


i'm distracted without you

by sun_dog



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Why Is This My Life?, and here i was thinking i was done with vampires, chp 7 up!, i always think about the line, k now there is porn, my little ace and pan vampire princes, so this is how they agreed, we a g r e e d not to discuss that
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-14 12:37:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8014300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sun_dog/pseuds/sun_dog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At first it seems like watercolor – the pale seaside blues of his veins. He blinks and the world fades and realigns. It is a sensory process, like submerging again after coming up for air. Like his head is being pushed down by a bodiless hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo I haven't written anything in 389272389 years. I might continue this because when I get feels for ships I spill forth these giant poetic epics that are too long, but idk! I never expected to ship these two so hard HELP ME SEASON 2 ps i never read the books

At first it seems like watercolor – the pale seaside blues of his veins. 

He blinks and the world fades and realigns. It is a sensory process, like submerging again after coming up for air. Like his head is being pushed down from a bodiless hand.

He is being taught to inhale water.

Simon trails his nails over his wrist, softly up the rigid tendons. It stings. His fingers stick there like on fly paper, halted by the creaking pain. This is when his brows draw in, threaded together by thoughts he refuses to own. This drought beneath his translucent flesh carries into every cell, stretching like a shout into an empty room.

Raphael says he will get used to this. This inflexibility.

When Simon looks at Raphael he thinks perhaps this starvation sinks into the place where your soul once slept, where it once hung on your bones. He thinks the starvation is like silt, falling to the floor of your being. Maybe this is why he adorns his body in lush blacks, tailored waistcoats, cuffed sleeves – each piece keeping the empty space enclosed, pinning the nothingness in shape. Raphael uses fabric as ink to draw himself together.

Simon leans over the edge of the bed, heavy-lidded, dark crescent moons sinking under his eyes. 

He closes them. 

You never quite know what feeling sick means until you feel it when you’re dead. This feeling is like screaming in a place where there is no air, breathing with plastic wrapped around your head.

Shadowed fabric curls hungrily around Raphael’s shoulders. It makes him look strong. Alive. He files through jackets in the infinite closet. In Simon’s blurred vision it seems to never end. They hang like jaguar skins, sucking in sound.

He tries one on, pulling it around his body, the fabric tightening between his shoulder blades.

Simon wants to scratch his fingers into it, thinks of his nails cracking away from the softness like silica glistening on pavement. His new senses construct his fascination. In the lens of them Raphael moves in astounding definition. He reads the scar down his cheekbone in intricate detail, can see the flecks of black in his eyes under the thick fan of his eyelashes. 

Simon swallows, feels it like an apple rolling through his throat. 

Maybe Raphael is made of velvet, or maybe if he touched the place behind Raphael’s eyes he’d crumble like dust.

Simon has been sick for the last twenty-four hours. Both eating not enough and too much. Confused by his own body, crumpled on the floor of Raphael’s room like an animal. Dragged to the foot of his bed like a pet.

Raphael doesn’t outright look at him, but Simon almost thinks he can feel what Simon feels. That he doesn’t have to look. 

Raphael throws the jacket on the bed, dissatisfied. 

Simon releases the hold he has on the underside of his own forearm, not having realized he is steadying himself.

Looking down he thinks it is strange to try to remember the feeling of skin—you don’t ever imagine you will forget, and that is the trouble of common things. 

You never think you will lose them.

\--

Raphael is leaning back in his chair, so far back Simon worries he’ll fall.

He can barely see him, placed so many spaces back along the gathering room table. The wood is dark and the edges carved into floral shapes, putrid roses climbing up a vine to bloom in the darkness of their company.

Everyone has been drinking—normally overindulgence is hardly encouraged, but this is a night for celebration. Camille is ousted and they have a child, a fledgling, once more.

They are throwing him a funeral.

Lily exhales slow linear angles out of smoke, but the toxins break form, sinking around the family in a low cloud. Somehow, Simon thinks, it makes them seem further away. Like they are speaking in echoes, or out of the past lives from which they came. She stares at him twice, pitless eyes sliding like marbles under a heavy fringe. Wet and dark. 

Simon looks away, frightened of her intensity.

The others, he is just beginning to learn their names, throw old dice along the distance of the table. Stained playing cards are flattened by icy palms. They bet with candy bars they can’t eat and cigarettes anachronistically packaged. 

Memories used as currency.

Crystal glimmers under the chandelier, cupping blood, pouring blood, emptying blood. It leaves a film on everything that was once clean and clear. Simon rubs at his pant leg, trying to push off the feeling it lingers on his skin. Incoming text messages are like needles in his brain. He can hear the wind outside, grating against the sidewalk like glass. The lights are dim but far too bright. He didn’t think so at first, but he is learning it is better to focus on the blood.

The sight of it draws his attention like beauty once did. 

Each drop is a sea, with his capillaries opening like eager lovers do. It almost feels like inhaling. His heart hurts from thirst. Putting a crunched palm to his chest, he thinks he will have to get used to that feeling. The scent of it pulls his head like a hound. 

He closes his eyes, overwhelmed.

Elliott, tall with a coal smudge of unruly hair, drums his fingers along the table. The sound brings Simon back – it burrows into his skull like a roach.

He is surprised to see Elliott’s fangs piercing his gums. 

Simon is learning revelry supersedes decorum, even for the undead. A stern-looking blonde girl ignores Elliott’s attention from across the table. Somewhere the old Simon files away a footnote on _fangpics (?)_ , but the new Simon feels his gums pulse. It still hurts when they do— in fact he can’t feel much else. His body is like the hull of a sunken ship, all at once too heavy to lift and yet hollow.

There is the unmistakable ring of laughter, the fumbling clutter of drunkenness, all this is the broad grin of change – Simon watches this cacophony of a happiness long-awaited as an accidental guest. 

He supposes it is like a funeral. In body, he is present. But in soul, he cannot find himself entirely attached.

He feels his gaze turn inward like a kid covering his ears to block out bad words. He tries to remember the scent of smoke, the bitter burn in his eyes like he wanted to cry when he dragged his first joint. He realizes then, it seems for the hundredth time, that everything will only get further away. The haze of inebriation is like a gong, slowly drowning out solid things. His shaking hand reaches across the table for something stable— blood, no, that’s life now. Life. 

“You seem awfully quiet?”

Simon looks up at the familiar voice, already feeling guilty. He’s not quite sure why.

“Nothing to say? It truthfully is a night for celebration,” the self-important tone makes Simon scowl reflexively. When he glances up he sees amusement written in all the places Raphael refuses to show emotion.

The older vampire is pushing a chalice of blood into his hand. Simon curls his fingers around it without thinking. Fledglings look more like ghosts than they do vampires. Raphael believes your past haunts you in the form of people. Simon’s whitened hands are shaking.

“I can’t do this,” Simon repeats, although he cannot remember the last time he’s said it he knows he is repeating it.

Raphael loses his good humor for a moment, his gaze drawn away towards the others—dozens of people, what were people. They are bent around the furniture, exhausted and fulfilled, blood-drunk and raucous, silent and satisfied.

“No one can,” he answers simply, shifting back in the chair, claiming the space with the broad stretch of his legs. “But we do.”

Simon thinks of something funny to say but it dies on his tongue.

“I’m dead, dude,” Simon reiterates lamely.

He is thankful for the nonchalance when Raphael looks at him, shrugs one shoulder on the arm that is thrown back against his chair. “Dead enough, if you insist. And a funeral comes but once in a lifetime, no? Best enjoy it.”

“I guess you’re weirdly right,” Simon answers, draining the rubicund liquid from the cup Raphael had handed him. The taste is riotous, like a bomb against his tongue, drowning out all other sensations to the point that he feels he might bowl over.

“Sensation returns with experience,” he offers, as if reading Simon’s mind. The fledgling is bent over the table, gripping the edge like it was possible to fall.

“I feel like you’re trying to sell me Viagra.”

Simon looks up quick enough to get the feeling Raphael is still becoming accustomed to the caring and nurturing his existence requires.

“I mean,” he amends, “thank you. It’s helpful. The advice.”

“You are an immense inconvenience to me,” Raphael answers plainly.

Simon actually laughs, the other making no indication of expression apart from his eyes following Simon’s smile.

“The more things change the more they stay the same, right Rapha,” Simon is spinning the glass between his fingers. It is a self-conscious action, but his tone is fond.

Raphael ignores the warmly casual nickname, seems pleased enough with a sentiment upon which they can finally both agree. 

“Creo que si, idiota. Perhaps you are not so stupid, after all.”

\---

“Why won’t you wake up?” 

Simon hears the voice half-dreaming. Or dreaming is the wrong word. It is more like swimming. Swimming through darkness in your sleep. No memories or thoughts. No sounds or colors. As if his head has been emptied out, its contents poured over a deep dark hole.

He feels a hand in his hair, cold, and opens his eyes.

“Ahi tienes. I thought I was going to have to hang you upside down again,” Raphael’s voice is smirking. He wonders if the older vampire was born unbearable or if it was a condition that developed over time, kind of like a supernatural cholesterol.

“Why are you waking me up,” Simon groans, swatting Raphael’s hand away, attempting to pull the covers back.

“You have been sleeping for nineteen hours, _malcriado._ ”

“Nin—” Simon sits up, bleary-eyed. “ _Nineteen_ hours?” 

Raphael’s boots make a rocking sound on the floorboards as he files his fingers into the heavy curtains next to Simon’s bed. The city lights are like white paint on his skin in the dark. There are icicles hanging on the windows. Raphael thinks they look like teeth. Like in here they have been swallowed. 

Simon can see shadows moving under his door at the other end of the room, it’s the others going about their evening. He imagines they could be tricks of the light. Like Raphael they are always so silent. Simon wonders if you are really here at all if you cannot breathe or dream or cause commotion. 

“Nineteen hours is—” 

“It’s common for fledglings to behave in strange ways. You are in a state of transition. Your body forgets itself,” Raphael talks to the window, as if Simon were an afterthought. 

“Well, what’s happened?” asks Simon, scratching at his bent up hair. He reaches for a pair of glasses that aren’t there. 

“Hm?” says Raphael, finally looking away from the window. 

“I mean— why did you wake me up? Is something going on?” 

“Going on?” Raphael quotes, purposefully obtuse. 

Simon flaps his hands emphatically, exhausted by him already. 

“Like is there shit going down or what?” 

“Oh,” the other answers, belt buckle glistening like silver robbed from the moon. He paces a few steps back from the window, out of sight of the heavens. “No.” 

Simon’s brows bend, he looks critically at the older vampire. Raphael is merely a dark outline in an otherwise dark room. 

“Honestly, it was nice when you were gone,” Raphael confesses easily. 

“Wow, you just touched feelings of fuck-you I never knew I could have,” responds Simon with a heaping dose of mock positivity. 

Simon hears nothing in response, but he imagines for some reason that this is Raphael’s version of laughing. 

He moves to stand up, but Raphael is suddenly on the edge of his bed, sitting in his space. He is almost too close and Simon draws his knees up self-consciously. He feels bare in his boxers and t-shirt, skinny legs and hollowed out ribs. 

“I need to talk to you about Camille,” Raphael says. 

“Good Mourning America do a pity piece on her?” 

Raphael squints, misunderstanding. 

“Nevermind—“ Simon backtracks. He holds onto his ankles, “Keep going.” 

“There is the matter of your abduction and your impression.” 

Simon’s brows go up under the messy fringe of his hair. “Uh… scary? Hella scary, I’m talking Underworld level, like, full-blown American Horror Story. When Jessica Lange was still a lead, obviously. Three and a half stars as far as abductions go, there was mystery, terror, acrobatics—is there a Yelp page for this or are you running some consulting criminal James Moriarty-type business— frankly I think I could be an asset given my experience, some might say expertise—” 

Raphael is still looking at him, clenching and unclenching his fingers together. 

"My question for you is do you desire to implicate me for my role in the circumstances of your transition?” 

“But you saved me?” Simon responds quickly, and the earnestness in his tone makes Raphael’s gaze falter fast enough to miss, at least it would have been if Simon hadn’t been staring him so completely in the eyes. 

Raphael looks away. 

Simon watches the tendons in his neck, how his skin is hugged by the darkness. He feels angry for a second by the way the shadows slowly claim the older vampire’s form, like a tide following behind each of his movements. He doesn’t know why he feels angry. He thinks about rubbing that blackness away— but has the strange thought that it might smudge Raphael all the way through. 

When he speaks again Simon can’t see his eyes. 

“No. It was Camille’s plan to kidnap a mundane in order to obtain the mortal weapon. I had my own plans but they still involved your capture,” Raphael repeats this like he has thought it a million times, has defined it that way. 

Simon rolls his eyes in the dark. 

“I don’t believe that,” he dismisses. Simon is almost too casual, and his ability to overcome psychological distress through infuriating flippancy is not lost on Raphael. “You wanted to overthrow her. You waited for the right time and used her plan against her – and then you tried to set me free.” There is only a second’s pause but Simon manages to keep the doubt from seeping into his voice, “Didn’t you?” 

“Of course,” Raphael’s answer is short, his tone is impassioned. 

They are both quiet for a moment, and then Raphael can practically hear Simon shrug. 

“Those were her orders and you manipulated them to stop me from getting my ass handed to me, t b h. Dude, you were in prime anti-villain territory, it was great.” 

“--Only to clear my name should the plan succeed,” Raphael insists, the crucifix around his neck glinting against his throat like a blade. 

“Look,” Simon stops him. His knees have fallen open and he is clear-headed. “You tried to send me away. I know you would have done it again, but she found me first. You might think I haven’t thought it through or whatever, but I have. I did. A lot. And on top of that I’m experienced in kidnappings at this point, as strange and uncomfortably prideful as that sounds.” 

Simon’s mind suddenly skips from the conversation to Raphael’s hands, cold, when they woke him. The other vampire is holding his fingers laced, like Simon has seen people do in prayer. 

Raphael exhales, something Simon has never heard before. 

It makes the air in the room quiver. 

It’s silent again for a moment. 

“I never meant for this to happen,” Raphael asserts. His voice is quiet. In the dark, Simon can’t tell where he is looking. “But I can’t tell you either that I regret what I’ve done.” 

Something in Simon starts to sting. 

The part of him that wanted a family, wanted a spouse and children, wanted road trips and summers upstate at the lake house Clary loved, the part that wanted to go on tour with his best friend Maureen and see his mother’s face when he got that idiotic CPA certification. The part that wanted to drag Rebecca when she did, finally, manage to trick someone into walking down the aisle with her. The part that wondered, naively, in synagogue as a child if when he died he’d see his father again the day he did. 

The loss of it snakes through his body like venom. 

He looks at Raphael. Maybe Raphael had wanted similar things once. Maybe not. 

But there is only one person he blames for the loss of that one particular future. And there is one person he blames for the actions Raphael took to protect the life, and family, he now had. 

“Don’t get me wrong —and no insult to form and only slight scholarly criticism of the infamous Catholic guilt and everything but— while your existence might hinge on the unknown nature of your soul’s forgiveness, mine totally doesn’t. And in this case you can’t escape the fact that someone is giving it to you.” 

Raphael blinks. Simon can finally see his dark eyes clearly in the dimness of the room. 

“Okay,” says Raphael. 

“Okay,” repeats Simon. “We are chill.” 

“Right,” Raphael’s annoyed tone returns. _“Chill.”_

“TL;DR, and as far as I’m concerned, to quote _Guardians of the Galaxy_ , you may be an asshole, but you’re not one-hundred percent a dick.” 

“I like that,” says Raphael, standing up. 

Raphael adjusts his belt while Simon stands, too. 

“Yeah? So you want to watch it with me?” 

“I don’t like it that much,” Raphael decides, heading out of the room. 

Simon is following him in his boxers and bare feet. 

\--- 

Sick again, Simon stumbles his way through the corridors of the hotel. With all asleep, not a breath taken, the hallways are dark and shuttered against the unbearable daylight outside. The stone floors are cold, enough to push away the thought of sunlight baking them within like an oven. 

His stomach balls in his abdomen and Simon leans over his body, nearly retching. 

He pushes against the French doors of Raphael’s bedroom, shouldering his way inside the unlocked entry. He makes only three steps rather than the usual four before he slinks to the ground. 

Simon feels blind, moves his hand around aimlessly. He is shaking and frightened. 

He feels a hand at the back of his shirt collar, blissfully cold. He expects Raphael to drag him to the foot of his bed, but instead he is carried, lifted like by almost no effort. 

“Can you die from being dead?” 

“No, idiota,” answers Raphael. 

Simon curls into Raphael's sheets. He clutches them like he could fall through the earth. He can't see the color but he knows they are black. They slip against his skin like silk. 

Raphael steps away, leaving the fledgling to the space himself. 

Simon reaches out and Raphael feels his hand catch his own unexpectedly in the dark. 

"I can feel that," Simon says triumphantly. Raphael can tell he is in pain, but at the same time he knows he is smiling. 

Raphael almost smiles too. 

That's the trouble with common things, you never think that you'll forget them. 


	2. i'm standing still again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Parrots shriek outside his windows.
> 
> It wakes him, vowels colliding like color on a canvas. Small green soldiers hiding in the branches of the trees, cheeks ruddy like dolls. They sound so happy. Trumpeting cries vibrating into the sky. He doesn’t know about guns yet, or how bullets ricochet in identical tempo. He is still young, and he doesn’t wonder how parrots learned to sing.

Parrots shriek outside his windows.

It wakes him, vowels colliding like color on a canvas. Small green soldiers hiding in the branches of the trees, cheeks ruddy like dolls. They sound so happy. Trumpeting cries vibrating into the sky. He doesn’t know about guns yet, or how bullets ricochet in identical tempo. He is still young, and he doesn’t wonder how parrots learned to sing.

In front of his window the trees let their hair down like tall women, perfuming the air. And in this quiet corner of the country, the wind meets skin like blowkisses lifted from the earth.

Inside the sun drapes across his bare skin like lacework through the pattern of the rubber leaves.

He breathes quietly, like a baby.

Raphael wakes up, startled, though he should know better.

Three pairs of hands, six individual, poke him, tickling him, all at once.

His little brothers sound like the parrots do, laughing as they pin him with bony knees and elbows. They are so young that they all look the same, like buds do before they blossom.

The birds squawk, little orange feet jumping back and forth on the thin branches.

Don’t remember these things.

(They are as bad as bullets— but there’s no blood to prove it).

(They are worse than dying— dying kills you only once).

\--

“How many times have I told you to _turn off_ that insufferable mindless _pinche tonterias_?”

The fledgling turns from his fixation on the screen, bare feet sticking out from ratty pajama bottoms. When his eyes meet Raphael’s he quickly presses a button on the video game controller, abruptly pausing the chaotic flurry of action. The three other clan members who had gathered around him quickly disperse, withering under Raphael’s gaze like plastic in the heat.

“I thought you said I could play Fallout 4!” Simon exclaims.

“Oh but I don’t remember saying anything like that,” Raphael angles his head, false smile spreading across his lips.

“You did, and I quote, ‘ _As long as it shuts you up, Dios bendicime que hice para merecer esto?_ ’ endquote,” Simon retorts, scurrying off the ground and following him when Raphael continues on his path to finish whatever exhausting errand has materialized today.

Simon’s Spanish is Americanized and embarrassing but upon realizing he could not use his mother tongue to talk over the fledgling’s head, Raphael announced he was thrilled, explaining that Simon would now know he was so annoying that it took two entire languages to adequately insult him.

Sometimes, however, even words are superfluous.

When Raphael walks each footstep cracks the earth, the pictures on the walls tilting helplessly in his wake.

“Do you remember now?” asks Simon, his presence over Raphael’s shoulder is like an umbrella.

“Oh,” Raphael emphasizes. “Now I remember.”

“Really?” Simon says brightly before the other, in less than seconds, gets so dangerously close to his face that Simon would have stumbled backwards— had Raphael’s fist not been balled into the front of his shirt.

“Yes, it’s all coming back, it was that time I wanted to _kill you._ ”

Simon stutters nervously, “I distinctly remember it _not_ being that time actually—”

“It was,” Raphael reassures him with an eye-locked expression so unforgiving it seems to still every sound in the room.

Simon is left fumbling as Raphael powers ahead, and with one glance taken ruefully back at his game, and his as-yet unachieved Level Objective, he resigns to continue his campaign for apocalyptic world resettlement via his own woefully diminutive computer screen.

\--

Everything on earth moves in waves.

That is because God made an Eve of the sea, and offered from her all life.

The ocean rolls in sheets of cerulean blue. The sound of his mother’s singing lilts through the laundry like a bright ribbon in the wind. The light at his door in the morning bends through the space between the floorboards to bid him buenos.

And the heat.

The heat beats down in waves like it wants to wash you clean in a way that water cannot. The kind of washing that hurts and leaves your skin flushed.

The radio is on— he is coddled by peace as if it favored him. There is something about him. A quality under his skin that draws these things close, as if he bones were magnet-plated, attracting warmth. His eyes are closed, body leaning back on the oblong rock that is planted in the backyard. He prefers it to the nice white chairs. He lays there like a salamander soaking up the sun. His boot taps against the ground.

Raphael is made of sun— that is what his mother says.

His skin is the color of canyons, catching reds and browns and yellows. Ancient blood.

Ancient blood hums in July.

He loves the tinny sounds of music hanging in the hot air like on strings.

Sometimes, if the reception is right, if he places the radio just perfectly against the cracked spot at the edge of the kitchen counter, he can intercept signal from El Distrito Federal.

Music feels ubiquitous. The most like God anything has ever seemed.

The names of the anglo singers taste funny on his tongue, but he washes the flavor down with watermelon and lime. He hears in America people are just recovering from the Great War. That is what they call it, anyway.

The summer is his favorite time of year.

He has started wearing his hair in a certain way, slicking away the curls at his temples for greasy smooth lines that leave his bangs hanging in his eyes. He thinks it makes him look older. His mother smiles and covers her mouth but says nothing. She is still young, her face absent of age lines. She sings while she paints in the corner of the bright crossed windows. Like the ocean, she fills empty spaces with life.

The first word Raphael learns in English is _comb_.

 _Hair comb, honeycomb, combed cotton_. He hears ads sometimes for goods he never knew existed. The radio is good for learning all sorts of things that school doesn’t teach you.

He hums the commercial jingles as they walk to la iglesia on Sunday.

Mass is a reminder of constants.

His little brothers keep falling asleep on him. He holds the youngest in his arms as he obeys the rituals of the service, rising and sitting down when called upon. He dotes on Esteban, holds him like a bird that just lost its wings. He is soft for his brothers. They need air conditioning in here. Two older women with thick black hair fan themselves and look like they might meet the Savior _inmediatamente_. The sweat makes his hairdo fall in weird places. His little brother sucks on the loose strands.

On their way home he bows his head at the group of girls gathered like flowers near the box office of the movie house.

His mother smiles, “They like you, Rapha.”

“Mama,” he admonishes, keeping his eyes down.

“You should wave to them!” Guadalupe waves for him, enthusiastically, and the girls burst into giggles. The sound goes everywhere like bubbles floating into the air. They soar out of reach. He grabs his mother’s arm. His mother laughs too.

Raphael closes his eyes, trying to think of the Sunday he skipped church to deserve this.

His brothers walk in and out of his legs, begging for piggyback rides.

They get ice cream cones and Guadalupe keeps smiling, talking enthusiastically about nothing. She tells Raphael about Spain, about the galleries in Buenos Aires, about her brother in New York. Her red mouth is marred by the ice cream and she laughs when passersby scold her with their eyes. They do not venture into the city often. Raphael is overwhelmed by the sheer mass of people— his mother is a proud person, sings at the top of her voice that Méjico is the center of the world, the idyllic garden. A jungle now made of concrete and traversed by gleaming cars.

Raphael has no opinions on Picasso but she asks him anyways, telling him emotions can look like colors and pictures can express experiences better than words. Guadalupe moves her hands when she talks like she could pull a world from a hair’s breadth of air. She draws funny figures in the sand for his brothers. Maria Guadalupe Hidalgo Santiago is radiant and educated, an artist from a good family. They ask her to sketch every animal they can think of, and when they beg Raphael for his input he requests a cobra, which his mother draws with fearsome curved fangs under a sinister brow.

“He looks like you, Rapha!” Esteban declares, mimicking his expression, and they all laugh, even Raphael.

Next week he sees the girls again.

His mother pushes shining coins into his hand and shoves him towards them, purple heels clicking as she makes haste to el mercado with his hermanos. Her wide-brimmed hat disappears into the crowd as his eyes fall on a girl with a black braid that touches her waist. It reminds him of night stitched into a garland.

The girl’s name is Paola.

Paola has dark eyes, and skin darker than Raphael’s. She wears soft clothes and she insists on sitting close up against him.

Raphael is focused on the movie.

He loves the cinema. The scores of the films recorded in distant countries. Excitement leaps in his veins as the lights dim. Perhaps it’s the hush of the soft walls that seems to blanket the soul from reality. He watches the screen light up, and the huge figures thunder their words like people do in dreams. The silence and cool air is like an icebox shut away from the heat. He gets to see an island and a monster. There is a beautiful woman with pale skin and a man with a mustache.

Paola kisses him.

Her lips press into his like the outside of a berry. Like the scent of something sweet that’s not yet bitten.

She is smiling when she pulls away, and slips her hand into his own.

At the end of the movie the pale-skinned woman and the man with the mustache kiss too. She bends so far backwards Raphael’s brows furrow. The image reminds him of a stork in the jaws of a wolf. Paola rests her head on his shoulder, holding his arm close to her chest.

He tries to picture her neck thrown back like that, with his arm around her waist.

They go to the cinema twice more.

The third time he sees her she rolls her eyes at him, locking arms with another boy who glares territorially. She walks away with her skirt billowing at the back of her knees, like a wake following the path of a boat. Her boyfriend spits on the ground.

In a few weeks he takes his brothers. 

They cover their eyes during the kissing and he laughs.

He thinks about Paola and her purple fig-soft smile.

Raphael wonders if all people want to break their necks for a wolf.

\--

It is the stillness of the air that reveals the dwelling of a vampire.

That is how the shadowhunters find them. It is the measure of the silence, like a lake of unknown depth. A word, like a stone falling through water, can easily break the glamor.

The hotel walls arch in dark maroons. Even the shadows seem slick and modern, as if they can do that — design the light away in their repulsion of it. The statues shuffled into the corners of the rooms stand like a voiceless audience, gathering dust in the dark spaces. The new lighting Raphael had installed is sharp and cosmopolitan, traversing the walls in sleek sable lines.

The motel-like glow is unintentional. The soft film on everything suggesting this is a liminal space, an unwelcome reminder that they are but travelers from one age to the next.

The night children are but shadows following the step of time.

Raphael tries to embody the power in this.

He will not roll onto his back for the Clave.

In his office his pen scratches against the paper he has pinned under his palm. The sound sweeps in his ears like resin gliding over the bow of a violin. Long inked pleasantries descend the page like a black curtain over a bright window. He rubs the bridge of his nose as he attempts to think of another way to compliment the rabble in Atlantic City with whom he is compelled to correspond.

That is when he first hears it, the thrum that vibrates his eardrum. He blinks it away like a fly that has gotten too close.

His pen stops in the middle of an eloquently cocooned threat as the thrum returns and becomes a series of recognizable fingerings.

The soft noise is like someone turning on a desk light and hugging it to themselves, as to not disturb others.

Raphael looks up slowly, soon placing the pen down.

The slow and methodical segment of notes climb and descend several octaves as he follows them through the hotel. They lead him like a butterfly, in several places all at once, but homing in on the nectar.

He is soundless, moving through the space like a stolen breath. Black boots weightless against the floor. It is like walking through time, a cold wind in the heart of the dim corridors.

The playing abruptly stops, a traffic jam of sound.

Simon has finally noticed him leaning his shoulder in the doorway.

The fledgling’s speed is deplorable. He supposes the look on his face says so.

“Sorry, sorry,” Simon whispers immediately, reaching for the guitar case.

Simon’s hair is messy, his arms long and thin. Not unlike himself, Simon is not quite grown and never will be. The older vampire can smell the soap against his skin. He can tell Simon has for once obeyed the parameters he set forth and eaten. His lips are pink, eyes bright.

Simon doesn’t use his enhanced speed to do anything.

He is always unadorned and so naked. Unencumbered like a child. Soft t-shirts and bare feet. Cotton boxers and unstyled hair like he just tumbled in from the rain.

He makes them all look so old.

The fledgling is sheltered and protected.

Raphael rejects the party-line disparagement that vampires are animals, spits upon the prejudiced characterization of their species as heathen individualists.

On the contrary, transitioning individuals are not left to claw desperately for survival, driven ravenous and mad by the change. Theirs is a community of protectiveness, and nothing close to the narrative set out by the clave which colors them as either detached or wildlings.

Yes, occasionally rogues slip past even the watchful eyes of the clan leaders, but in these cases poachers thrive— carving the fangs from their skulls for illegal jewelry, draining their blood for its life-giving properties, selling it on the black market to be used as unlawful cocktails for the aging elite in Idris.

 _Hipócrita_ s.

How fitting that they have a narrative of wickedness to point to when called out on their debauchery.

As her confidante Raphael had watched Camille play both the vampires and the Clave for her own self-interest, selling out her own kind to supply her hedonism. It is a unique combination of evil that leashes the downworlders and leaves space for crusading Nephilim to patrol their territories and murder their people _en el nombre de Dios_.

Vampires have fangs like lions do, that’s why they turn the food chain into a cage.

Simon clicks open the clasps of his guitar case.

With the sound Raphael regains mastery of himself.

“Seems even when you are not talking you still manage to produce noise,” Raphael observes as a way of stopping him. A long time ago he realized he could get people to do the things he wanted them to without saying so.

He forgets at this point if that is worth feeling guilty over.

“I consider it a gift,” Simon asserts confidently. He looks up with a soft smile. The light behind him throws his body into shades of silver and morning yellow.

Raphael reflexively squints.

Simon’s smile fades the longer the silence stretches, and he reaches for the case again.

He hesitates.

“Got any requests?”

“Asturias suite _Española_ cinco _?_ ’” Raphael throws back immediately, smirking.

“— Does that sound anything like Britney Spear’s Toxic?” Simon answers glowingly.

“Ah, sí. The anthem of your time,” Raphael mourns. “You just bought that?” he points vaguely, trying to determine the magnitude of his next headache courtesy of Simon’s inexpert practice in yet another field.

 “No way! I live to play—well, sort of.”

Raphael arches a brow at this new opportunity for incessant puns while Simon’s fingers skip down the fretboard merrily, a medley of notes springing up from nothingness.

In the still air the friction of his fingers on the guitar strings brings back memories of radio static.

Raphael closes his eyes, suddenly drawn inside himself like by a string pulling his presence to a center place. Alarmingly he sees the kitchen counter with the crack. The box on the edge with the ears precariously angled towards the city. _Comb, honeycomb, combed cotton._

He remembers the women with the dark hair in church, who could not bear the heat.

It is a kind of whiplash, the type of injury that needs immobilization.

Simon looks up moments later, a happy smile plastered across his face. Seeking acceptance like a flower yearns for rain. It’s too bright for this solemn place. A robin landing in a grave-country.

Raphael is still drawn inward and blinks, dispersing the memories in his mind to white noise once more. Flushing them out like an infection. He palms his brow bone, as if to pull them from his brain.

Their eyes meet and they both feel like they are seeing something that they shouldn’t.

Smash open a radio and the music stops.

\--

His mother is crying.

When he enters his home he sees Manuel, Esteban, and Pancho have corralled themselves into the corner of the kitchen, holding hands.

His dark brows knit above his eyes, bent like the wings of a bat, as he opens his mouth to speak to them when he hears her.

Her voice is muffled, pulsing behind the walls like a heartbeat, but he can tell she is afraid.

He blinks as the awareness seeps in, stepping into action before he thinks. This is what boys made of sun do— they burn. His brothers watch him pass with eyes as round as coins.

“Cuídate, Rapha!” he feels the small hand at the hem of his shirt. Francisco is his second youngest brother, but out of all three he is the tallest. His mother would say he is the most like Raphael. The bravest.

Raphael lifts him easily and places him back into the corner of the room. “Promiso,” he swears, kissing his thumb in oath, touching Pancho’s head.

The corridors are never dark. They keep the lights on because his mother dislikes the shadows. They aren’t good for her constitution. But the wood floorboards gleam in the spilled glow of minimal lighting, creaking under his feet as he walks towards the source of sound.

 “Que paso, Mama?” he questions as he enters into the room, walking to her directly in his concern. He holds her arms with fingers curled, protectively.

His mother’s eyes are red, cheeks stained like by calligraphy. Wet black lashes like sulking palms. Her expression changes to one of distress the moment she sees him. “Raphael, todo esta bien—tu Papa es aqui.”

She wipes at her eyes with her sleeve, smiling with her straight white teeth to assure him. Her smile is so lovely that it is tempting to believe her—such is her power to wield. Her beautiful blue muslin dress is sullied. Her red lipstick looks smeared.

“Tranquillo, Raphael,” the voice arises from the corner of the room. The sound of it is like a panther pawing grass so it bends in half.  “Or have you come ready for war at last?”

Raphael feels his muscles tense, the words like a wasp bite at the back of his neck.

“There would be no better waste of my time than to fight you, Papa,” he responds, sliding his eyes to the shadow-haired man. His father wears expensive clothes. The curtains of the sitting room throw shapes of flowers against his face. He looks like a jackal, surrounded by black weeds. It is the jaundice that makes his eyes yellow. But everything rots when your insides are tainted.

Gustavo’s expression flattens. He stands like someone had bent his spine by pressing their palm on the top of his head, yet the remnants of a soldier remain— his straight legs and arthritic fingers. There are many bodily costs when you dig a well of blood to swim in glory.

“Who taught you to talk this way to me?” the way he speaks is somehow a combination of violation and pride. But that is his way, never one or the other.

“Let him be, Gustavo—”

“Undoubtedly you did, Papa,” Raphael answers spitefully, brows arching. He stands with his shoulders thrown back, old enough to challenge him at last.

Over the years Raphael has learned the truth to be the most effective of all weapons. Mightier than the sword was for mother’s Don Quixote, or the noose has ever been for _Capitán primero_ Gustavo Santiago. It is this one thing that can best any challenger. It was what defeated his father, when he realized the shrapnel he took in Juárez would no longer allow him to serve as oficiale under Sr Presidente. It was what cleaved his bohemian mother’s heart, like a geode, when she realized she could never love the man to whom she was betrothed and wed.

The truth is a scythe to remind us we are not angels—in that way it is a weapon of the heavens. God does not leave his flock to the mouths of beasts with nothing sharp to wield.

Raphael feels the blow before he registers that he’s seen it.

He stumbles, not feeling the blood coursing from his cheekbone. His father’s ring glistens around his middle finger, striped with his iron like a tiger.

Guadalupe screeches, in the back of his sensory understanding. His father pushes her off of him, hand tangled in her hair.

Raphael’s ears are ringing.

Finally, he raises his head. Sanguine paint tapped from his body falls from his face in streams, and his father’s expression changes.

The world is pulsing, figures faded, but still he recognizes that he has never seen such a look in his father’s eyes.

Perhaps it is the blood on his face that changes things at last.

“One day you will know what I have done for you, Raphael Juan Manuel,” shockingly his father’s calloused hands cup his face. Raphael bucks, struggling against it, but Gustavo’s strength remains alarming despite his dilapidation. The dirt on his father’s hands burns his open wound. Gustavo kisses him, cracked lips meeting his forehead. Grip like a vice.

“Fight _always_ ,” he demands, fingers crunched around his skull, Raphael immobilized. His father seems to take a breath, inhales like the air could end like a road does. “Ve ahora!” he looks to Raphael’s mother.

Stumbling back out of his hold, Raphael sees his expression change again when he looks at her.

It is one of love. Unmistakable love.

It is the kind his mother read of aloud, fingers in his hair, while he fell asleep as a child. In Raphael’s unlevel state he suddenly thinks of roses, how his father is truly a poor man. Bereft of roses, and grasping at thorns.

Raphael’s eyes focus when his father pulls his mother’s face to his own by her jaw, and she lets him. Her hair has fallen, it looks sunken, absent of all life against her skin.

And then suddenly she turns, quickly latching her hand around Raphael’s arm, pulling him from the room, feet rushing against the ground.

There is a pounding on the back windows.

Raphael thinks of the rock in the backyard, and the radio, the summertime.

It’s hot outside as his mother drags him through the front door, her other hand clutching the shirts of his brothers. Flat shoes black against the dark stones. They are running.

As they are pushed into a car, bright flames reflect in the blacks of his eyes.

He watches them rise like blades held aloft and pierce into his home.

All he can feel is heat in his soul, the unbearable press of the twilight outside, the orange whips of fire searing the sky.

It closes in on him like a mouth, like he has been chewed and eaten.

He can’t differentiate between the sound of gunshots and the brutal pounding in his head, but somehow he knows his father is dead. Maybe he would have run in after him.

His vision fades black as he hears la llorona, _or his mother?_ wailing— denying his father entry into heaven.

\--

Raphael’s collar surrounds his neck like a hand at his throat.

The black jacket protects him from the hail of city rain falling across the island.

“Dude, I can’t vamp-speed through puddles!”

He is ignoring the fledgling, entirely detached from his plethora of complaints today.

Simon squints in the rain, eyelashes wet, like cold dog, and it would be funny if Raphael laughed at those types of things.

The scent of coffee spikes the air with warmth. Glowing windows are dressed with sheets of sparkling rain under the clouded sky. Masses of people move like shadows under their umbrellas, crunched in between their dark raincoats. New York City smudges in the rain like coal.

“Where are we going anyway?” Simon asks. Incessantly. “Also, can’t we just take the subway?” he gestures to the mouth of the serpent, the stations that lead to the underground transport which slithers through the intestines of the city like sludge passing through a bowel.

Raphael can hear the hiss of the cars against the tracks as wet feet climb up and down the concrete.

“We’re almost there,” he says. It’s the nicest thing he’s said all day.

Simon rushes through the crowd, passing through slivered spaces like a secret, stumbling against briefcases and ducking below umbrellas, attempting to keep up with the leader of their clan.

“I suck at this!” he shouts, confusing the rout of city dwellers who assuredly think the words arise from nowhere at all.

They run to First Ave, a neglected portion of the city, shoved to the west side like shoeboxes when cleaning a closet. Simon is out of breath when he speeds to a standstill beside Raphael.

“Took you long enough,” Raphael observes, glancing over. The steam from the sewers rises into the streets.

“Are you kidding me!” Simon exclaims, winded. “I got lost on Spring and ended up in Soho. I smashed into a kitsch cart in Chinatown. Paper umbrellas. Everywhere. It took me like, five minutes to find you again,” he gestures erratically with his hands. Raphael watches them as if they could be cut off for convenience.

“The more you insist on panting _como un perro callejero_ the more you exert yourself. _You don’t need to breathe._ I thought we went over that already— wait, we totally did. Idiota.” Raphael rolls his eyes and scans the street for his objective.

Simon stands up, “’Totally’?”

“I’m not picking up your idiot colloquialisms,” Raphael states factually, and zooms off, splashes leaping in his wake.

“Sure, Raphael, sure,” Simon’s amusement scatters into the wind as he follows.

Several moments later he skids to a halt behind Raphael, nearly colliding with a streetlight. Shaking his wet hair like the aforementioned perro callejero, he brushes the water from his ears, turning to see the other at a standstill.

“What is this place?” he asks, approaching Raphael’s side. He looks around to the dark windows, they look black and empty under the rain. The sign hanging over the door is stark white script against black: _Amaro y Casas. Arte Fino._ “An art gallery?”

The fledgling looks around, up and down the street are similar buildings, each with their own sign marking the doorways. This is a part of town he rarely, if ever, frequents unless for some reason Clary wants to play cosmopolitan and see some elite overpriced crap – sorry, art— that dismissive dealers would stare at protectively after a couple of kids walked in.

“Is this like a secret hideout or something?” Simon whispers suspiciously. Come to think of it, snobbish art dealers had all the makings of covetous trolls or some other equally offensive species.

Raphael heads inside, subconsciously pulling his jacket together.

Simon follows, walking past a sign which is pressed behind the condensation of the window.

_El Movimiento: La Revolución mexicana_

Raphael walks briskly into the space.

It is expansive and like all galleries, nearly entirely empty. The barriers walls are a shining glossed black to offset the bright primary colors of the art hanging inside.

Simon quickly loses Raphael after giving a somewhat distrustful nod towards the secretary. She turns her head haughtily, heavily-lined eyes finding their way back to her computer screen.

Traversing the space, he sees violent reds intersect harmonious blues— yellows of battlefields and riotous oranges. Pinks and teals. But then also photographs, bloodshed and hope and the birth of an era under the banner of self-determination, carefully enveloped in the gleaming rain-drenched streets of the city.

His thin frame casts darker shadows on the floor, surrounding by the chic lighting that hangs meticulously over each work.

“Hey Raphael are we taking some of these back to the hotel?” his voice seems exceedingly loud, somewhat echoed by the space as he finally finds the other. Raphael is standing in front of a piece himself.

When he doesn’t answer, Simon’s brows flit together. He looks from his face to the portrait hanging on the long wall installation. The colors leap from the canvas. There is a man, and a woman. She has a wide-brimmed hat and deep-red lips. A man sits in front of her, her gloved hands rest on his shoulder. He is older certainly, but still young. His black beard obscures his handsome features, and his form is pulled together in what Simon can only assume is some kind of a military uniform. Simon isn’t sure what to call the style, but it’s colorized, strokes not entirely clear in execution.

“Woah,” he says, stepping back. “This is really nice.”

He looks to the plaque directly next to it.

_Capit _á_ n primero y su esposa. This portrait displays former insurgent lieutenant Gustavo Juan Miguel Santiago. Following the insurrection and ousting of Porfirio Diaz, Santiago joined the Federal Army under the contested presidency of Francisco I. Medero. Holding on to minor state militant power through various coups, Santiago and his family perished in a house fire in 1949 in his country home at Zacatecas. His wife, a contemporary of renowned Frieda Kahlo, became heralded after her death for her depictions of revolutionary history which altered the forms of Renaissance portraiture with stylistic Mexican Nationalism. Self-portrait. Maria Guadalupe “Lupita” Hildalgo Santiago. 1935._

“Oh shit,” Simon rereads the plaque several times. “These are your—”

“Gentlemen what can I do for you?” the art dealer, a tall woman with jet black hair and needle-like legs appears like a spider crawling out from a curve in the wall. Her tone is somewhat critical and bored.

“I’ll have it,” says Raphael without looking at her.

She blinks, half roused from her stupor. “The asking price is one-hundred and seventy-five thousand," she states.

“I said I’ll have it.”

“—it’s customary to issue a counter-offer,” she begins to say, the sycophant crawling out of her like an arthropod. Simon feels vindicated, confirming there are creatures in here after all, and before Raphael has to scathingly reiterate once again, he turns to look at her instead.

“He said he’ll take it. Are you literally deaf or what?”

The woman’s eyes grow and she nods at him, nodding at Raphael too although he doesn’t look at her, before she obediently scurries away into the dark.

“This is _so_ cool,” Simon says once she leaves.

“Is it?” Raphael asks loftily, toying with the lapels of his jacket once again, keeping the portrait on one side of him like he has become an electric fence.

“Uh— duh!” Simon gestures to the work of art. “Your dad was some covert sneaky revolutionary dude and your mom is in a freaking gallery?”

Raphael shrugs like it’s not the simplest thing.

“Don’t even pretend right now,” Simon warns him, eyes sweeping back up to the faces immortalized in bright color. He can’t help but drop his gaze back to the other immortal standing in front of it. “You look like them!”

“Obviously,” Raphael says.

“Shut up—” Simon answers as he follows Raphael who has turned to leave. He’s guessing they aren’t waiting for them to wrap this one up and put it in a bag. “But you didn’t die in a house fire,” he says.

“You think?”

“So your mom took you here to—” Simon gasps. “Dude she, like, fled the country! Raphael!”

“Dios.”

“Oh my g— I mean,” Simon chokes. Raphael can’t stymie the grin at the verbal pothole. Simon is undeterred. “You’re just like them!”

The older vampire’s expression crunches. “So not true.”

“Yes, it is! You overthrew Camille! And reclaimed the destiny of your family name! You’re like… Zorro! You’re like… _Batman._ The Clave is Porfirio! Dude, _Pancho Villa_ are you kidding me? You were like… political fugitives! But how did you get away? Did your mom have someone on the inside? Were you scared? Oh my g—” He chokes. “I mean of course you weren’t scared— You’re a _Santiago_.”

Simon talks ceaselessly the entire way home. Asking details. Filling in holes with imaginary, and completely inaccurate, dramatics.

He doesn’t take a single breath, which is a vast improvement breathing-wise.

The rain seeps into their clothes, Raphael’s hair is wet, curls falling from their hold.

Simon’s impression of his father is colored by fable, nothing close to the complex and dangerous man he had barely known. But he doesn’t correct him when he fantasizes his mother was the most beautiful woman in all of Distrito Federal. Simon finds out he had little brothers.

“Pancho— that’s short for Francisco, right? Manuel. Esteban. I only have one sister, and she’s terrible—”

Simon walks shoulder to shoulder with him, animatedly waving his hands as he speaks. They are almost like one figure in the dark and the rain. Raphael looks at the fledgling’s face when he says _Guadalupe. Gustavo._ Simon has a mother but no father. Simon looks into his jacket, fidgeting. He looks around at the lights on the street.

"Was he as talkative as you?" wonders Raphael, interrupting his thought process.

"I never stopped long enough to notice," says Simon, smiling ruefully. His brows kink as he thinks back.

"Totally unsurprising."

"'Totally'," Simon quotes again.

" _Stop_."

They take the subway back.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I never read the books I basically went to the Raphael wiki and got a few very basic facts from the book about his background to make this up. i really love writing about his fam??


	3. i've got to go sometimes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rain falls like the earth has inverted, like the five oceans drain through a sieve in the sky.

The rain falls like the earth has inverted, like the five oceans drain through a sieve in the sky.

Water collects in the streets and rushes from gutters as if they were inside an hourglass, turned over by a bored deity. He hears the downpour like it is frying against the rooftop, a haze like white noise from a television.

It makes him feel detached.

It is a lullaby sung by someone who wants to sew his eyes shut. A bad person with a needle and a thread.

It only adds to the disassociation he feels from the change, and the blood. It separates him from his body like a crowbar, prying him further and further from his form. It leaves a space cranked open that Simon is not sure will ever bend back together.

For several weeks he has been training across the city.

He can manage the speed if he must. He has finally forgotten the feeling of nausea. The memory no longer plagues him as he outpaces traffic on dead blue legs. He hears things that he wishes he could not but he can now attempt to hear things that he wishes he could. Like radar, he can fine tune his ears into the secrets of others.

His skin is still numb. Like by opening the door of a freezer and dallying too long. It is still strange.

Simon stands in front of the mirror.

The room he was given at the Du Mort surrounds him like the whispering shell of a crustacean.

He looks at his naked body.

He sees too much strength, shadows carving ditches around his muscles. None of it seems right or possible. His eyes look hungry. It frightens him. If eyes alone could eat he does not want to dream up the havoc of his appetite. This is the worst of you, he thinks. The hungry part. The chain at your feet, dragged behind like a weighted ball.

Simon sighs and pulls a shirt over his bony sternum.

His phone is empty of messages.

Lightening flares through the window like popped neon and disappears again.

_When are you coming back from Boston?_

He sends it like whipping a bottle into the sea.

_At least bring me pizza_.

\--

When he reaches the kitchen he shuffles around its perimeters like a bird cautiously plucking at a bank populated by crocodiles.

A few of the others nod to him civilly, silent and pale, their eyes following him like paintings do in a museum. _Ubiquitous gazer._ That was the technique. He remembers Clary smiling as she pointed it out to him at the Met, orange hair like a corona falling around her face. Her skin, pale as tundra, and the fire that striped her back in long locks— they reminded him of the mournful saints in Christian religious scenes from the European dark ages. He hated that. He would avoid looking at the haunting images as they passed through the hallways. He wondered why they all looked so sick, as if they were damned, as if in their case it would have better to believe in nothing at all.

One of the vampires has black earbuds in.

They cling to his cartilage like the feet of tarantulas. Simon can hear the music pouring from the microphones inside his own skull. In the corner, with her back turned, tall and twisted as a cyclone, is Lily. She frightens him.

Her hair is dark like the edges of nightmare and straight as words fired in anger. When it’s wet he half expects it to bleed ink down her elbows. It nearly reaches her lower back and is sharp on the ends as if it were cut through with a blade in a clean sweep. Simon can feel her presence behind him and her gaze is like someone dropping ice down the back of his shirt.

“You must eat,” she says, and Lily’s voice is like the tide lapping sand. Gravely and soft.

“I want to— believe me, but,” Simon looks around for an angle of escape as her eyes cross him over and over. It has the effect of a cobra squeezing around a rodent. He swallows tightly.

Lily’s eyes narrow, black and bottomless under the knife of her bangs. “But?”

“I’m really nervous right now, should I be nervous?” he asks, nervously.

“That depends,” she answers factually, and leaves no other elaboration. “You are surely famished? How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” Lily’s head tips to the ceiling as thunder rolls above them like rocks, and then falls back to him. Long white fingers with black shining nails drag towards him on the table as she walks closer.

“Not since yesterday,” he answers her, figuring he’d better. Raphael had informed him Lily was the head of affairs in his absence.

Her sharp eyes widen and recede under her hair.

“And you’ve yet to claw someone’s eyes out? Hm,” she mulls. “Not bad for a brand new… advisor to the Interim Chapter President,” she repeats the title like it has holes in it, breath slipping through the frailty.

“That was— Raphael’s decision,” Simon reminds, reaching for the fridge, having backed up every time she stepped towards him until he was completely around the counter at last. “Your fearless leader,” he adds for good measure.

“Ours,” Lily corrects, with brows creased suspiciously under her bangs.

“ _Ours_ , yeah,” Simon repeats in confirmation, smiling big to diffuse her tone. He reaches inside the fridge and pulls out a cold bag of sanguine cocktail. He looks at her, gears shifting in his mind. “Do you want to… share?” Simon’s nerves are sometimes a guise.

Lily stares hard at him without blinking and he finds himself wondering what she is looking for.

“Sure.”

“Cool.”

Her brows angle suspiciously again.

“I mean?— Good?”

She walks out of the room and he, surprised, follows her. Not entirely sure where or why they are going.

\----

The train from Boston to New York is three hours of cocooned silence.

Raphael is sure that he could run faster, but he prefers to sleep nestled in the exclusive car. The enclosed space is like a grave, insulated from the cold. At this point he can admit such things are comforts— the easy sleep of death, and the dreamless slumber of a dead brain. He used to hate that immense quiet.

He used to beg for noise on his knees.

His phone buzzes beside him as he closes his eyes.

The fledgling is saying something about pizza. He stares at the message impassively before swiping through the dozens of other messages that require his attention, movements jostled lightly by the tracks below them.

A woman with dull golden hair smiles as their eyes catch. He stares at her as her heartbeat hits his eardrums like darts.

The sound of it in her chest is scattered and confused, as if it was never taught how to love anything. Too much, and then too little.

He knows really it is the potassium, the ruined electricity, and that she will die earlier because of the damage. He thinks she must be lonely to treat herself so badly, as he listens to her capillaries exhaustedly squeeze blood into her frail body.

Raphael doesn’t like for people to be lonely. He offers her the smallest of smiles.

_I don’t need a play-by-play de su vida inmoral,_ he soon texts to a recipient named Useless Warlock, generous demeanor evaporated. _Your depraved liaisons and extradition from any European country remain the furthest thing from mi problemo, desmadre. Bother Magnus._

Raphael had received Ragnor’s messages over a week ago, not responding until now.

Usually ignoring the sorcerer would engender embarrassing fits of begging and mania.

Not this time.

He looks at the messages dated several days back, with no word since.

Raphael files the silence into the back of his mind as something to be investigated with reluctance, as it is most certainly his turn to bail the decadent fool out of whatever prison he has found himself in. Magnus likes to remind him of the last incident in St Petersburg which required the glittering enchanter to portal into a blizzard and consequently walk twelve miles in the snow.

The warlock had explained the last time he’d been to Russia was centuries ago, while Raphael had listened, drunkenly slunk in his loft chair. His boots had scraped the floorboards as Magnus frowned disapprovingly, proceeding to remove the boots himself.

He’d last seen the old city while on holiday with Camille.

The club they had stayed in at the turn of the century was, apparently, now a sludge-filled dairy farm miles from civilization.

Raphael remembered laying his head back on the chair as he slid to the floor, warm in the amusement of Magnus covered in bovine excrement.

It was, undoubtedly, his penance for starting the trend of leather handbags.

“Dios es misterioso,” he had mused, his expression creased in taunting animation, before Magnus had poured an entire martini directly over his chest.

Magnus rarely donated liquor to any place other than his bloodstream.

He puts the phone on the empty seat next to him.

Glancing to the other clan members who had traveled with him, he finally closes the tomb of sleep over his consciousness, night having painted the windows black around him.

\---

It is none other than Magnus himself who appears in the dark terminals of Port Authority.

The way he is so obscured, the shadows seem to crawl towards him, as if they somehow belonged in his possession. His eyelids are slicked like by oil grease, and as he moves out from the murk Raphael catches a glimpse of feline eyes, with slitted pupils like daggers in wait.

“To what do I owe this misfortune,” Raphael wonders, pulling his jacket around his body in the crowded terminal. The river of passengers flows around them until the space is near empty once again— it is life, bending like light around the figures of two immortals. “Are you still waiting for your angel to fall _del cielo?_ This desperation, Bane. Shadowhunters are our living hell, trust me I would know.”

Raphael’s smirk leaves his eyes as, like the girl on the train, he can hear the blood in Magnus’ chest constrict. He wonders if the warlock had used a glamor to hide the emptiness he now reads in his eyes— they are wet, glistening as though he is finally in the company of one with whom he can be himself.

He reveals Ragnor’s phone, the highlighted messages displaying Raphael’s unanswered correspondence from hours ago.

“Such misfortune, my dear friend,” he answers, voice caught in a way that alerts Raphael to danger.

It hits his stomach the way that praying does.

Blue words in the dark.

It is the pain of realizing control is impossible.

\--

“Can I ask you something?” Simon says, standing just inside of Lily’s door. He stands back cautiously, as if afraid of getting splashed.

The walls of her room are dark blue, oceanic, making the room seem somehow heavier. Like they are moving in slow motion on the sea floor, while monstrous things glide among them, practically invisible.

She walks to the far end of the room, seemingly in errand. Her tall body moves through the space like a specter.

Simon watches her, drums his finger on the blood bag.

His eyes skim the room— it’s the first time he’s been inside of someone’s personal room apart from his early agonizing search for sanctuary in Raphael’s rooms. Back when the blood was new and his body rioted against him, causing him to curl up on their leader’s floor like a rabbit frozen in the snow.

Lily has very few lights on and Simon almost squints in the darkness.

He sees a frame with a photo turned upside down.

There are two girls in the picture, one much taller than the other. Both with long black hair. Their shoes have buckles and their garments are so white the contrast nearly erases their detail entirely. The garb is old-fashioned, the grains in the photo faded. Otherwise her room is quite modern, a glass-topped desk with clear legs in the corner. It glows as if from lights within.

Simon watches her fade into the darkness of the space and walks to the desk, placing the blood bag on top, searching for glasses of some kind.

“I was wondering—” Simon continues, undaunted. He scans her bookshelf, catching glimpse of her bed piled high with amorphous items of clothing. The space is a strange mix of stark minimalism and uncontained mess. He finds what he is looking for on a stand in the room’s other corner. Two glasses, crystalline. He tears the blood bag open easily, pouring the contents out. He can feel his body lurch at the scent, as if daring to jump over a steep cliff.

He hears Lily bumping in the closet.

“Uh,” he blinks, pulling himself back into his mind. “How well do you know Raphael?” his tone affects casualness. When she doesn’t respond he modifies, “Like, really well? Like… for a long time really well? Or— not so well? He just seems to trust you, mega trust you, for Raphael anyway, and that’s not really a Raphael M-O so I thought you must… know him,” he finishes airlessly.

As his eyes adjust he begins to see a black standing mirror by the far window, it too has a small inlay of dim lights along its edges.

His wheeling hands accentuate his speech. “Not that I mean like, _know_ -him know him, of course,” his brows come together quickly as if in sudden realization. “Unless you do _know_ him—”

Lily interrupts him by appearing out from the closet. She reminds him of a tree. Birch. Tall and thin and pale.

“I need your help,” she confesses, her gravelly voice thinned.

The distress consumes her like winter.

Simon’s brows crease in concern at her sudden change in demeanor.

“—me? Why?”

“Because you were a mundane so recently— you must remember. Of everyone.”

“Sorry?” Simon says, putting the glass down at her desk. “Remember what?”

She reaches her hand out, as if calling to him.

He approaches closer, still unsure.

Lily drags up an item in her hand that he hadn’t noticed before. It is a dress, stunning black like abyss pulled up from the bottom of a cavern. There is another in her hand, he can’t tell what color, perhaps a dark blue, stones embedded in the fabric glimmering faintly from the dim moonlight filtering through the curtains.

“Which is pretty,” she explains.

“I think you’d be a better judge than I would,” Simon says self-deprecatingly. “My fashion sense was once labeled ‘Help’. Honestly, one time I got mistaken for the pizza delivery guy by my own family members at—”

Lily ducks her head at his response, this confession seeming to have drained her bones.

“Wh— woah, wait, but you know— I could… try? Yeah I could totally try,” he tries a broad smile for convincing effect.

“Thank you,” she says, looking relieved under the thick sheet of her dark hair. “Gracias.”

“You speak Spanish?” Simon says, with some friendly surprise.

“I speak… so many languages,” she answers, almost defeatedly. “I didn’t mean to offend. I sometimes hear you and Raphael.”

“Stalker,” he responds happily.

She seems to catch this as a joke seconds later.

Lily disappears into the closet again and pulls out several garments, they trail behind her like streaks of paint.

“So what gave you such grave distrust in your own fashion sense that you would consult me, a mere padawan,” he makes conversation.

Lily’s brows crease under the angular frame of dark bangs.

“I cannot see them,” she responds.

Simon catches his own response before the realization sets in.

The dark room, her eyes obscured by her bangs, black like marbles. How they move under her brows like glass. The glowing furniture with its faint electric charge. Lily is blind.

An endless eternity in the dark.

He feels something squeeze the place where his heart had once beat, and with peripheral realization that he still has one, his eyes rise to her own.

“And—” she responds. “Raphael doesn’t approve. I can ask no one else.”

“He doesn’t?” Simon asks, suddenly suspicious. “Why not?”

“She is not our kind,” Lily says.

“Oh my g—“ Simon chokes. “Lame. Hey, you can tell him I said it’s cool.”

Lily smiles finally, he thinks at his expense. A row of small white teeth like pearls.

“Of course, _advisor_ to the Interim Chapter President.”

Simon smiles back.

“No problemo, _assistant_ to the Interim Chapter President.”

\--

The night is long, stretched like taffy over the curve of the hours.

Raphael arrives home in the deepest hour, the bad weather dragged in behind him like his back was spined with arrows, pinning the storm to his bones.

Simon practically swings down the railing to meet him, sneakers smacking the cold stone floor as the other clan members shut the door against the lightning and rain.

“Hey,” he breathes happily. “Where’s my pizza?”

Raphael doesn’t look to him, handing his jacket to someone else.

“Remember that time I slept for nineteen hours and you said it was nice getting a break from me? Well this was way more than nineteen hours and I don’t share your resolve, dude, I have been so bored,” Simon prattles, unable to contain the strange excitement he feels, as if the home has been revived, now that Raphael has returned. “What happened, how was the leader of the Boston clan?”

He walks alongside Raphael, who is typically silent.

At one point he had heard another clan member speak of Sandra Desdemona. She and Raphael had been briefly acquainted in the fifties, but had parted ways for reasons left undisclosed. Their alliance, Raphael had emphasized, was imperative to the vampire community in the northeast.

When they get to Raphael’s doors he turns, actually placing a palm flat against Simon’s chest, as if to hold all the sounds he is making inside. The force behind the motion is soft, almost like he is resting his hand there instead, too tired to pick it back up. The strangeness of the action is enough to snuff Simon into quiet, like a candle covered over. His eyes meet Raphael’s.

“No ahora, Simon.”

“Who died?” Simon asks suddenly, his energy frazzles, like panic covered over with a blanket.

Raphael blinks in response to this, removing his hand as if uncomfortable with touching him.

“Are you okay?”

Raphael is uncharacteristically readable. He looks at Simon as if he knows he is being seen.

“I can’t tell,” he answers, honest for what seems like the millionth time to Simon.

Simon is starting to realize Raphael is always honest.

Even at his most underhanded Simon cannot think of a time the other was truly false.

He suddenly thinks of the mournful portraits in the museum, their hollow faces and blank expressions. Their belief tunneling the life out of them like oysters pulled out of shells. He wants to grab Raphael’s shoulder, to stop him from turning and to duct tape his edges shut. To shut everything in and keep what is left in there from leaving him.

Death has always spun out of Simon’s hand like thread on an emptying spool. The consequences escaping his control. He feels suddenly anxious.

Raphael turns into his room, the door slipping closed. Shutting like a vacuum, a clear space where nothing can be heard or felt.

Simon stands staring at the door, his eyes owlish and his posture sunken somehow, like something is drinking him down from the inside. He swallows, glancing down at the floor and then back to the dark wood sealing the other away.

He feels the kick in his chest again, like an animal angry at its cage. The phantom heartbeat— reminding him of a night so similar, a decade past.

It was like this, the rain, the night his father died.

There had been a ghost in his mother’s eyes when she walked through the door. Like who she had been was gone now, too.

Unlike Raphael she hadn’t said anything.

But Simon was young. Simon had never asked.

He wishes he had.

\--

The following evening Raphael emerges from the bedroom, Simon’s bony form collapsing inward as the door opens. He blinks alert, hair mussed, bleary-eyes meeting Raphael’s.

“Were you honestly sleeping here?” Raphael’s voice lacks his ever-present impatience. He sounds tired. The filter strips him of pretense. He seems real somehow, not neon and grease and sharp objects, but soft and new. So— human.

“I just—” Simon stumbles for the right words. “I didn’t want you to wake up and feel like you were alone.”

“I didn’t get much sleep,” he responds on the level, offering a hand up.

Simon takes it, standing.

“That’s okay,” he says, hoping it sounds reassuring. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

Raphael looks at the fledgling for a moment, his overly-attached, jabbering, inconvenient and unexpected by-product.

Simon’s hair is sticking up in weird places.

“Ragnor always spoke about moving to a better climate,” Raphael exhales. He implies with raised brows that his friend undoubtedly got his last wish.

It seems like reticence falls off of him when he does, like the spines off a fir tree, all at once.

Simon listens, brushing his pants off as he follows the other. “Wasn’t big on rain?”

“An Englishman is burdened with a personality as charming as any depression,” Raphael explains, referencing the weather that still rattles the roof above them.

Simon’s brain cross-references in his tired state, coming up with a Mr Darcy early-Bruce Wayne hybrid. He hovers around the other, walking close but not too close. Raphael pulls on the jacket he has been holding. Simon can see his eyes look drained, like a well taken of all water, although his demeanor has not changed in great detail.

“Where are you going?” the fledgling asks worriedly, and Raphael’s eyes narrow slightly.

“To pray for his soul, por supuesto,” he answers. “It would infuriate him.”

Simon’s brows hit each other a bit, the small crack of a smile breaking his concern.

“Not a fan, huh?”

Raphael turns his back, heading for the door.

“Trust me — he is going to need it.”

Much later, after coming home soaked to his core, hair painted flat to his head like ink, Raphael insists to Simon that Ragnor would find a way to get demonically removed from this plane of existence during the worst rain New York has had in eons.

He was, definitively, the most vexing and infuriating person Raphael had ever met, undead or alive. Or effectively, dead.

Now, Raphael had informed him, Simon was the reigning champion.

“What a privilege,” Simon says. “My second title.”

Simon watches Raphael shut himself away into his office, lets him be. The hotel is quiet in the aftermath of his grief. Here they understand death— immortals who live by curse or accident, who see others off into the Next, happy or at worst envious of their departure into eternal sleep. And like a family, they mourn together.

Elliott cheekily reveals his bottle of mezcal hidden under the tile in the main hallway, and has no complaints when Raphael covets it close and his words begin to gently slur. Bernice sends roses that glitter, by spell, and Stan very somberly reads some kind of verse that Raphael closes his eyes to and crosses himself over. When he opens his eyes he looks more anguished than Simon has ever seen him. It spurs Simon to reach and touch his knee in support, blurred from the drink as well.

Lily lights rows upon rows of candles for the deceased which Simon notices blow off and on trickily as if by magic. A group of several clan members work in a silent scramble to button up drafts and relight, and light, and relight. They seem to lose some control of it, worried they are being disrespectful.

Raphael notices and rolls his eyes.

“Hostia!” he cries to seemingly no one, but Simon has the distinct feeling he is talking to someone very real. “For once let me mourn in peace, cabron,” he begs, completely put out.

He buries his face in his hand, fingers snaking into his dark hair and causing it to stand up on end. He is gripping the mezcal in the other. Raphael looks like he is half way to fury, half way to exhaustion, and as close to laughter as he is to tears— every expression combined to make something entirely new and nameless.

Simon suddenly feels a strange kinship with a dead guy, not an undead guy, but a really for real dead-dead guy, and silently promises to continue making Raphael’s life as difficult as possible.

In tribute.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for the comments and encouragement!! :) they mean a lot. i really wanted to include ragnor because after finding out he, magnus and ragnor were like the immortal squad i can't imagine him not finding out


	4. because you're cooler than me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raphael’s thumb is dragging over his mouth, hard, the rest of his fingers curling around the tendon that pillars the back of Simon’s neck. His grip is a claw, and the bone nub of his thumb grinds under Simon’s lip, crushing over the smooth ridge of his teeth as it sweeps to his cheek.

Simon’s words are cropped, like a radio wheeling through stations in the middle of the night, dial glowing in the black numbness of the dashboard.

Raphael’s thumb is dragging over his mouth, hard, the rest of his fingers curling around the tendon that pillars the back of Simon’s neck. His grip is a claw, and the bone nub of his thumb grinds under Simon’s lip, crushing over the smooth ridge of his teeth as it sweeps to his cheek.

Simon is trying to say words, but they scatter as they leave his mouth, leaving him with nothing but like tracks in the snow to suggest footprints. He can feel Raphael’s hand at the back of his neck, pushing his head into the crook of bed sheets. They ripple like water at the other end of the movement. Simon’s hair is splayed over his eyes in the dark, fanned down, crumpled against his skin and the fabric. His curls are loose and clean and smothered.

He is reaching back, fingers searching and gripping tight against the other’s thigh.

“Shh, I’m not going to hurt you,” Raphael coos. His voice lulls like a cello, trailing its bow over Simon’s nerves. “You do realize I have been doing this for quite some time?”

“Can you please not remind me you’re like, a septuagenarian right now,” Simon pleads irritably, voice muffled in the dark.

Raphael laughs, low in his throat and it curls around Simon like the sound of waves in the silence of night. “Don’t be so generous, querido. I’d be almost celebrating my eighti—”

“You are literally like, not even a little bit funny,” Simon interrupts.

Raphael shifts his body, the hard lines of his frame a cage against further movement on Simon’s part.

Simon mewls, kicking his foot back helplessly.

“This is the kind of behavior that makes you people so tragic to watch,” Raphael muses. “A toda costa, no? Dignity be damned,” he says, pulling apart the buckle of his own belt.

“Dignity? So— so lame. I gave that up a million years ago,” Simon rattles edgily, palms balling in the sheets. He groans. “So in the name of my forgotten dignity please hurry up, I’m dying.”

“Que pena,” Raphael smirks. “I’m crying for you.”

His belt lands with a metallic clang on the floorboards.

“Oh yeah you sound choked up,” the fledgling answers, nerves lighting up at the sound.

“It’s true— seeing someone under the age of thirty denied instant gratification always makes my dead heart clench in joy,” Raphael admits.

“Oh my g-“ Simon chokes on the word, throat constricting as he winces into the sheets.

The feeling is forgotten quickly when Simon feels cold hands enclose around his hips, and then his body dragged back, deleting the space between them.

Raphael’s wrist is angled toward the ceiling as he pulls his middle finger out of his own mouth. His brows are rigid and bent in a concentration, like he takes every minute movement very seriously.

Simon’s words fall apart, detached letters tumbling out of his breath like rocks hurling down a hill as Raphael’s finger slides into his body to his knuckle, his other hand expanded along Simon’s ribs as if steadying something wild.

“Go-“ Simon gags on the word again, this time more epically than before.

“I’d rather not we bring Him in here,” Raphael replies. “He won’t forgive me para todas las cosas malas that I’m going to make you do,” he says, pretty slick about it.

“It’s impossible not to bring Jesus into it, you have a picture of him hanging above your bed,” Simon manages to snap, blood rushing to his groin, burning the tips of his ears. He is seeing colors against his closed eyelids in the black room as Raphael strokes the inside of his body, careful with every motion to minutely increase penetration.

Raphael makes a dismissive expression in the dark that Simon can’t see.

“He’s not looking,” he assures.

“Jesus is always looking,” Simon says defiantly, or so he’s heard.

“He has his eyes closed,” Raphael responds affirmatively, curling his finger.

Simon chokes again, hitting a fist against the mattress.

He feels his fangs pulse in his gums and it diverts his brain, taking everything he has to keep them hidden under the burn.

“Are you seriously choosing now, of all times, to fuck with me?”

Raphael’s fingers tighten against his ribs and Simon thinks maybe his word choice hit him someplace in the primal part of his precisely controlled software.

 “I’m not fucking with you,” Raphael promises, talking about the picture again. “I’m looking at him right now. He has his eyes closed. He’s tired Simon, he’s had a long day.”

“Can we please stop talking about Jesus,” Simon begs, body finally relaxing in a slow swoop like cloud cover easing the glare of the sun. He yips helplessly at Raphael’s next thrust, eyes falling shut with a kind of honest defeat. He is leaning back into Raphael’s form behind him, knees pushing into the silk of the sheets.

“Claro,” Raphael agrees, cataloging the reaction from his— partner in this, feeling Simon’s muscles lose tension. “Let’s talk about you, cariño.”

“Mm,” Simon murmurs, cheekbone sliding against the bedsheets, eyes shut with brown lashes fanned down like banana leaves.

Raphael has a rhythm with his finger that Simon is matching, the fledgling is pushing back against him and it’s causing him to grin in the dark— a wild slim kind of grin that drips down the corner of his lips until it is almost a frown, the kind Raphael only gets after he’s had too much blood and forgets too much about himself under all that red. It is a low kind of satisfaction, spreading through his spine like a cat, elastic and reaching.

“Me?” Simon reminds selfishly, sounds muddled further with every thrust.

“Si, you,” Raphael says. “As the baby of the family it’s easy to forget your place— but I don’t foresee that being an issue with you,” he’s predicts, self-satisfied.

“Gotta take advantage of the position you’re in— lets people start thinking they’re in charge,” Simon agrees, eyebrow pulled against the bed.

Raphael is grinning and so is Simon and neither one can see the other.

“Sure, _baby_ ,” Raphael says, kinking his knuckle and dragging hard against the prostate with the flat pad of his finger.

Simon is lost in the sudden rush of sensation, it encloses him like hot water, and his thighs tighten and his forearms tighten and the space between his eyebrows disappears. Raphael’s name is spinning in his mouth like a broken record. He hooks a hand around his cock with automatic fervor, and Raphael covers it with his own in synced unison.

He leans over Simon’s body and Simon feels enclosed, like Raphael is his exoskeleton.

Raphael’s name paints Simon’s tongue like the walls of a museum.

Simon calls him so loudly Raphael dubs him _ringtone_ for a week.

\---

“Will it do anything?”

Simon’s brow is raised, spiny on the inside end like a porcupine forever tensed in uncertainty.

“I don’t know,” Raphael shrugs, flipping a pen in his fingers, arm resting on his knee as he sits somewhat slack in his office chair. “You can try,” he says unaffectedly.

Simon is standing in front of Raphael’s desk, his thin form bent like a windmill in the wide expanse of the room. The deep brown wave of his hair is flipped over one eye, sinking now as the product put in it this morning fades. He looks unconfident.

Raphael is at the desk, crowded by warm shaded lights like flowers. His chair is upholstered in deep red and the space in front of him is neatly boxed with paperwork, posh metal pens, and the smooth hum of expensive, thin-membraned electronics. He is wearing a dark suit that encloses his form, like ink bleeding to dye a second skin over his first.

Simon shrugs too, as if copying Raphael for self-assurance.

There is a quick shuffle of noise and he is under Raphael’s desk, knees crooked under the wood, shoes bent against the floor. Raphael notes there is one way to get Simon to use his vampire speed.

Nerves.

Simon’s thin fingers curl around the soft material of Raphael’s pants and unhook the metal buckle on his belt. His crisp suit jacket falls to either side of his body and Raphael is looking down at him, black hair swept back over his forehead and dark assessing brows framing his black eyes.

Simon frowns nervously and tries not to imagine the time he wore Raphael’s suit jacket, how he slept in it drunkenly and didn’t want to give it back.

He seems to think better of what he is doing, mind scattered, and begins to palm at the material instead, using malleable motions to caress against the length of his dick.

Raphael’s boot slides out half an inch.

“I feel like I’m the slutty wife in Scarface,” Simon says conspiratorially, grinning when he looks up.

“Elvira Montana was a saint,” Raphael defends, one eye shut encouragingly.

“Oh it was definitely a compliment,” Simon clarifies, excited Raphael likes _Scarface_. He moves and accidentally hits his head on the desk. He shifts.  “How do I know if it’s working?” Simon asks.

“I always assumed you knew how la polla works, idiota— you do have one. And you are touching it. Constantly.”

Simon scoffs.

“New vampire.”

“Right, you’re a baby,” Raphael says as if he’s remembering, position in the chair more slunk back, the soles of his shining boots sliding against the floor.

“ _The_ baby,” Simon corrects, unhooking the button of Raphael’s pants.

“Mm,” he agrees approvingly, hand moving into the slicked locks of Simon’s hair.

“I just don’t want to push anything you’re not game for,” Simon explains. “I want to be respectful of your whole deal.”

“Deals are good. I like deals,” Raphael says unintelligently. “Why don’t you put your mouth where your doubts are and we can see what we can do.”

Simon’s brows climb his forehead and his eyes crunch from the smile he makes.

“You got it, boss.”

\--

“Aey!” Raphael snaps, waving an annoyed hand into the air. Elliott immediately comes to attention. “I’m on el pinche teléfono.”

The other vampire speeds from the doorway, shutting it behind him in an instant.

Raphael has his hand knotted in Simon’s hair and Simon’s knees hurt.

His hands grip the sides of Raphael’s desk chair. Raphael is slinking further and further in his seat, and Simon’s jaw is increasingly loose. It makes it easier to take more, and this is good, this intimacy.

He’s good at this, he knows he is, and he can feel the tension in Raphael’s abdomen when he reaches up to grab the flap of his pants, pulling it downward to make more room. The length of Raphael’s dick fills his mouth and grinds across the slick bed of his tongue. He coughs reflexively when he slams into the wall of his throat.

“Lo siento,” Raphael says as Simon backs off, and he means it.

“It’s kind of hot,” Simon answers, like a suggestion. His voice is hoarse and his lips are rubicund and wet.

He has a good-natured smile crossing his lips goofily despite appearing somewhat wrecked.

Raphael’s hair has fallen against his forehead. He looks nice. Too nice. Guapo nice. Like, real life could be your profile pic kind of hot. Simon scrapes the back of his hand over his chin to clean himself.

Raphael’s eyes narrow in conspiracy.

“You like to play rough, querido.”

“So long as you’re good,” Simon says.

This makes Raphael smile, actually, and he looks to the side before looking back at him.

“I’m always good,” he answers, offended. “Swear to God.”

Simon reaches forward again, adjusting on sore knees. His palm encircles Raphael’s dick. It’s wet, cold from his saliva and the fact that they’re— well, dead.

“I thought we weren’t going to bring G at the O at the D into this stuff,” Simon corrects.

“You impugned my honor,” Raphael defends weakly, head falling back against the back of the chair. His eyes shut as his brain zeros in on the slow stroking from Simon’s hand.

“Okay, Zorro,” Simon answers.

“No sword jokes,” Raphael insists, eyes still shut, a couple fingers moving up in feeble protest.

Simon doesn’t have the motivation to make any as he brings his tongue to the base of Raphael’s dick and licks a smooth line to the tip of his foreskin.

Raphael makes a noise that Simon likes a _lot._

“You look like a music video,” Simon says, idiotically.

Raphael makes a motion with his hand like Simon could have said any number of stupid things and he’s still encouraging him to keep doing what he’s doing.

He opens his mouth to let his shaft fill the empty space, lips warm from the friction. Simon closes his eyes because he likes doing this. Raphael has his hand locked in Simon’s hair and he’s moving his hips in small complimentary ways while Simon is pulling back and taking him in. Simon is breathing harder and his eyelashes look neat and fanned against his cheeks. He is gripping onto the lapel of Raphael’s jacket, and Raphael’s boot is skated to the side, leg open wider on one side than the other.

They are quiet for several minutes apart from the mumbled reactions from Simon, higher-pitched noises than he would have preferred to project met with affirming encouragements from Raphael. Which in turn makes him change his mind about the noises. Submission encourages Raphael’s machismo and Simon likes the freedom that comes with that— appreciation and attention.

He wants Raphael to say something and almost on cue with his mind he hears, “Simon, you are good for me.”

The older vampire’s voice is tight, but the semblance of control is still there.

It shakes off quietly in the next few moments when Raphael comes, whispering frustrated prayers in sacrilege.

\--

“I’ve been thinking about kissing you,” Simon blurts.

Raphael, overlooking the absolutely mauled dead body of what was once, presumably, a werewolf, turns his head with the most scrutinizing of all expressions. The cold streetlights cast discerning shadows across his cheek bones and the wide set to his gait gives him an aura of intimidation.

“And this is your ideal setting to, what, announce this to the New York underworld?”

Simon blinks hard and fast with both eyes as if that alone sums up how out of his depth he is.

Raphael gestures to the decomposing corpse not three feet away. “Qué romántico, Simon. Your judgement is even worse than I thought.”

He turns back to the observation at hand smoothly as if nothing of import had transpired between them.

“Wait,” Simon says, somewhat frantically, interrupting him again. He takes his hands out from their shoved place in his jacket pocket, having buried them for either some grounding poise or against the swirling mist permeating the air around them.

Raphael looks back up, brows saying he is only half interested and for only half as long as he was for the first interruption.

“Wait— is that— normal? Does that happen— to— to fledglings. Do they get like— attached? Because I can’t stop thinking about it—“

“We do fuck, Simon,” says Raphael bluntly, as if stating the sky is very fucking blue.

“—So you mean—“ Simon’s brain scrambles.

Raphael rolls his eyes back into the grave and goes back to looking at the body.

“I’m saying get a hold of yourself. Your shadowhunter friends are here,” he announces, somewhat spitefully, without altering his attention from the scene before them.

Simon, lacking undead suavity, does in fact look over, seeing Clary, Jace, and Isabelle approaching in the distance as slim silhouettes.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here,” says Jace, self-importantly. His bravado, however, is friendly, as his next statement seems to release all culpability. “Thanks for calling us, Raphael.”

Raphael’s dark eyes seem expressionless when they look at him, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

“What happened here?” Izzy demands, looking up to Simon’s eyes powerfully, and casting a quick dismissive glance towards Raphael.

Simon fumbles a little, mind still not on the topic of the dead before them.

“We found him like this,” Raphael answers commandingly, which causes Izzy to look over despite.

“Guess he should have been more aware-wolf,” Simon finally chimes in, causing Jace to huff lightly in the background of the curling mist, his knees bent to inspect the scene.

“That is not funny,” says Izzy, moving around him somewhat forcefully, eyes touching on him with something like disappointment.

Simon opens his mouth to confront this, feeling it hit a place he doesn’t like to be stamped on— the modicum of pride he’s managed to preserve throughout this whole ordeal. Izzy is strong, passionate, and admirable— seemingly losing her respect confounds him.

“Simon,” says Clary, her clear voice rings through the air like a sword. Simon is always relieved to see her. “Are you okay?” any airs of Nephilim drop when her eyes meet his, and she is his Clary once again, and as always. Clary— worried, and bright as the sun.

“I’m fine, I was just here trying to not jump my boss and then _bam_ , dead guy!”

“How do we know you didn’t kill him?” Izzy is asking Raphael, pointedly.

“Jump your—” Clary glances to Raphael as well.

“If your detective work is that bad I’d consider a career change, perhaps Nephilim fry cook,” says Raphael pleasantly.

Simon knows when Raphael is pleasant that means he is pissed.

 --

“How come you were so rude to Izzy?” Simon asks, pulling his shoes off.

“You have a thing to learn, Simon,” Raphael answers, hanging his jacket. “Shadowhunters always suspect us. They have prejudice. They’re mojigatos.”

“You think she really suspected you?” Simon says, ready to diffuse that.

“I know she did,” Raphael says plainly.

The simplicity of it stalls Simon a little bit, making him lose his breath. His eyes are big, like pools of innocence blinking away droplet by droplet.

“But you did the right thing,” Simon points out.

“Si,” Raphael nods.

“Why do the right thing over and over if they’re just going to suspect you every time?”

“You tell me,” Raphael says. The echoing foyer of the hotel is empty.

“Because—“

“It is the double-edged sword, Simon, you can’t win,” the older vampire explains.

“But— how can anyone live like that?”

“Because we stick together,” Raphael answers. He begins to walk to the kitchen. “They can call themselves angels but we know the truth.”

Simon looks after him, and follows. “Which is?”

Raphael looks at him seriously, turning from the counter once they get into the kitchen.

“The angels are in heaven with God.”

Simon exhales lightly, sensing most of the feeling slip out of him. He watches Raphael reach into the refrigerator and choose a vintage, pulling out the bag and pouring it for the two of them. He takes the glass.

“I’m with you, you know.”

Raphael looks up, as if he was in thought.

“With me?”

Raphael has this annoying habit of being purposefully obtuse.

“Like I— I would defend you,” it sounds lame coming out of his mouth, as if someone like Raphael would ever need defending from someone like him. “I mean,” he amends, “if I ever had to I would be on your side.”

“This is your home now, we’d do the same for you,” Raphael says easily, taking a sip of the blood.

“But I mean you specifically— I mean everyone— but you specifically.”

“What is the purpose of you telling me this?”

“Raphael,” Simon exhales, begging. “I’m trying to tell you I’m your guy okay, like, I’m not with them, I’m with you, you don’t have to be jealous.”

“Celoso?” Raphael says, the word hanging in the air. “I’m not jealous, Simon,” he assures as if it was the most petty thing any mortal could contrive.

“Okay that— I didn’t mean jealous, I meant like, suspicious.”

Raphael looks at him for several moments longer. Simon feels like a small animal in front of him, Raphael with his eyes sharp as a beak to break flesh, so much like the fangs that could core him in a second’s time.

“My father used to say once someone uses the word suspicaz you should cut off their hand— because sooner or later they’ll stab you with it. Por la espalda.”

Simon looks a little frightened, putting the near empty glass of blood back on the counter. Then he regains his full height, after a moment’s thought.

“Your father was full of shit, no offense.”

Raphael stares at him until his expression unexpectedly softens, a small almost rueful smile spreading onto his lips as he looks away, taking the final sip of his drink. His teeth are red when he pulls the cup away, a brief exhalation of laughter. “He totally was, you know.”

Simon feels a little better.

“Are you going to bed?” Simon asks.

“No,” Raphael holds up a finger on the hand still gripping the glass. “But you should.”

Simon’s shoulders fall a bit and he decides he will. He slides the glass forward on the counter island, confident Raphael will do away with it.

“Night,” he says and Raphael nods barely.

Simon stops early on his projected path, however, pausing beside Raphael.

He leans and, looking back, kisses the side of his face, lips leaving a soft print against his cold skin.

Raphael is affixed almost exactly in place as Simon quietly leaves and his singular footfalls can be heard ascending the stairs to the apartments above.

His father’s warning rings in his head again, faded memories of dinner by candlelight in Zacatecas, his father drunkenly turning a gleaming butterknife as he spoke, Raphael looking on, red wine refracted.

He hears Simon’s door open and close quietly upstairs.

Raphael stays there for a while longer, suspicious of his own corazón this time.

Thinking perhaps he should cut it out before it kills him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> omg thank you for the kudos! :) :) lolllll why do chem work when you can write PORN. omg ive never written any smut before i was like laughing so hard at myself when i was writing this. i normally am so descriptive in my language that like "HIS DICK STOOD UP" makes me super uncomfortable to write, lmao, but i tried. BUT ALSO? i aim to be very respectful of raphael's sexuality, my sis is asexual (and i am pan!) so she gives me the DL and then i write the writings to be inclusive to both of them and the spectrum of where they could possibly be at in those parameters. ALSO? izzy is the queen UGH I LOVE HER i have a feeling she and rapha are going to be talking more in this story at some point (sizaphael anyone). last ALSO? im sorry simon used the word 'sl-tty' he's problematic w that personally i despise that word even in a 'positive' context. PS HAPPY OCTOBER!!!


	5. too busy being yours to fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon doesn’t dream anymore, but sometimes, on the edge of sleep and waking, the fledgling still feels memories. This is another part of the change. The visitings. Recollections that slip through the crevice of death like insects, scurrying through the spaces vacated by the soul. Hauntings that pull those who are transitioning to a place of halves— neither here nor there, not real or imaginary.

The last of the moonlight drags from the bed like the foam of waves pulling from the shore.

Black silk gleams across the frame, glassy like a lake revealed in myth. Raphael rests there in the center, as if shrouded by thorns, sleeping in the pool of emptiness from which the heavens were painted dark.

His clavicle catches the light like swords are sheathed into his bones and the moonlight pales his bloodsick skin. There are shadows carving out the places where his eyes should be. Hollows scooped into his sockets as if he has no eyes. As if he was born without them.

Or as if he had seen something so secret, someone went and cut them out.

_To see no evil you must be blind._

Those were the words.

There had been no shortage of tales delineating his father’s infamy, vivid accounts traded among company men and rebels to terrify the commanders under D _í_ az during the insurrection. It was a tactic of war, Raphael had learned, to sicken the brain. One that wounded better than any weapon could scatter blood or shred the bone of man.

It soon became common knowledge that the brutal methods of _capitán_ Santiago required no embellishment to ensure the mark of dread. It was said he had spoken the phrase while carving the eyes from an informant found in the midst of the insurgency’s inner circle, a brother-in-arms they had loved como familia during the long years of hardship.

The spy had been delivered back— ears lobbed from his temples, eyes snapped from their sockets, and tongue sliced from its tendon— to el general militar in southern Chihuahua.

Raphael had first heard the story over breakfast, decades later.

A thin-framed government comisionado who had holidayed at their villa in Zacatecas recounted it laughingly as crumbs fell from his mustache. Comisionado Ramon had dabbed his eyes with the stark white napkins his mother had fretted about ironing. He seemed to think it a mirthful joke, how blood is alchemized into gold.

Raphael had placed his fork down in revulsion.

The words had spun in his mind as Ramon continued to talk without impediment, asking his mother about her work though his eyes focused on the smooth column of her neck. Her artful thoughts on impressionism and the revolution of primary color went patronized rather than absorbed. Raphael watched as Guadalupe’s carefree demeanor turned rigid and careful in the presence of Cm. Ramon.

His little brothers played with their huevos, feet dangling above the floor, while the yellow sun stretched through the turquoise-paned windows. The table cloth was immaculate and unstained. The silver spoons caught the sun’s skirts, refracting a glare up into his eyes.

Raphael became fixated on the spotless servilletas as the talk faded into his peripheral attention. They now wore translucent smears from the grease of Ramon’s hands.

The thin-shouldered bureaucrat raised his voice again as if to continue with full attention, clearing his throat with the citrus juice that rolled down his throat in a visible bolus. The liquid was saturated orange, encased by the clear glass in his hand. Raphael brought his eyes up despite his distraction, obedience and decorum bred into him like waking up one day with un tatuaje.

“I’m reliably told,” Ramon began, as if starting in on an exciting secret. “That your father kept los ojos, las orejas, y la lengua del espia and roasted them— he ate them _como un dios_ ,” Comisionado Ramon’s eyelashes were long and wide, seeming to reach out from his eyelids in delight as he recounted the rumors.

He had patted Raphael’s shoulder with a tightly cupped palm.

“One day perhaps you will bleed for country,” he encouraged, soft hands lifting his glass again, thick squares of ice spinning like dice inside.

Raphael noticed how the burócrata drank like he was parched, as if he were full of holes and could never quench his thirst.

“There is but one kingdom to which I seek admittance, Comisionado,” Raphael had responded truthfully, although he knew the truth was rarely proper or polite. His mother then rose from her seat, pouring Ramon more citricos, the sound sloshing between them. It did something, at least, to cover Raphael’s black eyes which were empty of the civility to which Ramon was accustomed at all costs. “Y un solo Dios que quiero saber.”

He was too young then for his impudence to be taken seriously.

Despite this fact, his candor always seemed to alarm a certain kind of person — wolves dressed like men, pulling skin down around their gums to hide their teeth.

They did not like boys like Raphael, whose eyes marked their bodies in red for the angels.

Ramon had smiled then, a pulled, thin smile Raphael thought had to be learned by someone who did not know true joy in anything. “Dios del cielo can give you nothing la Méjico cannot.”

Raphael had heard his little brothers fighting joyfully with their silverware, their muffled laughter along with the shriek of metal buried at the far end of the table.

His eyes held steady on Ramon’s own.

“Perhaps,” Raphael seemed to agree, with finality.

His mother had covered Comisionado Ramon’s hand then, her presence shifting energy like a breeze, smiling obligingly at their guest whose inquisitive eyes were drawn away from Raphael to her red-lipped smile.

Raphael had watched her gleaming teeth and laughing eyes with guilt.

He pictured Cm. Ramon sin lengua, writhing on the floor. He wondered if God ever took pleasure in the pain he decreed. Raphael despised how violence could bring him comfort. He looked at the nice white napkin in his hands, as if it might be stained black under his fingerprints.

The bureaucrat was one of his father’s many attachments whom they were beholden to entertain at Zacatecas on command.

Raphael turns, hair crunched up against the pillow, dark brows falling into one another.

Once Simon had slept next to him, the fledgling’s hand finding his cold fingers in sleep. Raphael had watched his own hand curl up in response, like a flag curls around the wind in a country that you love.

He sometimes thinks about that at night, when darkness bookends his thoughts.

He thinks about Simon’s throat and his own hands and wonders if he should never touch him again.

The sun burns over the concrete carapace of the Du Mort but inside it is black, hushed through like a cave by the sea. The corridors yawn into giant capillaries, like a mine dug through a forgotten mountain.

Raphael’s eyes open into slits.

His phone lights up in the dark, creating a cool dome of bright blue.

The message is from Elliott.

_Are you awake?_

_\--_

Simon doesn’t dream anymore, but sometimes, on the edge of sleep and waking, the fledgling still feels memories.

This is another part of the change.

The visitings.

Recollections that slip through the crevice of death like insects, scurrying through the spaces vacated by the soul. Hauntings that pull those who are transitioning to a place of halves— neither here nor there, not real or imaginary.

This is the middle place, the burden of the undead.

What is the combination of a dead brain and a living memory.

The disorientation is not unlike lights strobing across the cortex, everything stopped yet also still in motion. Fractured, highlighted moments. Like when a word is spoken aloud that no one wants to answer, and it hangs in the air alongside heartbeats.

The visitings are handprints across brain matter, like soot from an old life that must be cleaned off, rubbed away in empty lobotomized motions by bloodless hands.

 “Simon?” Lily’s voice rasps sharply in the dark, searching for him.

The Du Mort is their home, yet in the shadows it seems to sprawl out like a beast stretching its open jaw, growing away from them like vines. It is a special kind of glamor, used to confuse intruders or lure them in, like a web holds onto prey for the spider.

Her black hair gleams an oceanic blue under the dim hall sconces, kohl-rimmed eyes slick like the shells of beetles opening and closing over her eyes. Lily’s legs are thin like stilts, and she wears a sweatshirt bunched up by her elbows and a woolen beanie. She listens carefully in the silence, black eyes steady under her fringe.

“Did you find him yet?”

Elliott emerges from around the corner, his voice bounding off the walls, too loud.

Lily narrows her eyes angrily at him, throwing up two long fingers. Commanding silence. Her head turns a millimeter as if carefully listening, before finally speaking to him.

“I would not have to find him if you did not fucking lose him,” she answers, vocals burning. “You fuck.”

“So you didn’t find him,” confirms Elliott with a grin. He is only an inch or so taller than her, slender in frame, bleached white hands pulling his elbows together as if cold. The boots he wears are snakeskin, capped at the point in metal. “Failure’s a stepping stone to success or so claim the failed,” Elliott says reassuringly.

He walks closely alongside her, looking into the rooms on the opposite side of the hall.

“You seem quite cheerful for someone who is going to die again,” she observes, stopping now and then to listen to a sound that flees even Elliott’s enhanced senses.

“Might as well die in a good mood,” he answers, pausing as if in recollection, a nostalgic grin spreading across his face. “Come to think of it I’m pretty sure those were my last words the first time in Arizona.”

“Good,” says Lily decisively.

“Never trust a barmaid with a forked tongue,” Elliott warns, brown eyes peering into various dark corners hoping to find the misplaced fledgling. “Or someone who doesn’t cheat at cards,” he adds, as if remembering something very important.

Lily is pointing to his cell phone a few minutes later, the gesture made the split second before he receives a text message. She can pick up on the electric resonance.

It’s the boss.

_I am going to kill you._

“Turns out he is going to kill me,” Elliott dictates. “That’s actually better than I thought—at least he didn’t specify when. I’ll take that as negotiable.”

“So let’s negotiate,” Raphael says, materializing beside them. Lily turns attentively, having known he was approaching, while Elliott shoots a glare in her direction.

“I’m sure he’s still in the hotel,” Elliott says immediately.

“He lost him while losing money to the Knox brothers again,” Lily fills in, bored. She listens to the minute sounds between them by second nature, gauging their exact positions and reactions, making a picture in her mind.

“I’m sorry, _que?”_ Raphael turns from Lily. “You _lost_ him?”

“More like temporarily misplaced,” Elliott smiles, holding his hands up in defense. “But— yes. Ish. Yes-ish.”

“Dios mio,” Raphael says, eyes scathing. He seems to inhale and then all of his spines even out again. “I’ll take the East Wing. Lily, you and Elliott go West—y Elliott,” Raphael says, stopping him in his path.

“Boss?”

“Next time you’re drunk and _misplace_ our fledgling you will be nursing that hangover con tequila sunrise, mi amigo. Emphasis on the _sunrise._ ” Raphael cocks his brows, “Comprendes?”

Elliott thinks of the bright sun volleying its spears at the shell of the Du Mort.

“Loud and clear, boss,” Elliott nods, fully aware of Raphael’s penchant for revenge. But Elliott also knew, perhaps better than anybody, that Raphael’s actions were underpinned by a deep compassion. Perhaps one followed the other, or he occasionally blurred the two in his intensity. “Loud and clear.”

\--

Simon remembers the chords first.

It is the progression of them that draws him in, slow and pleasant like a pulse at the center of the house. It pulls him in like the site of fire does to a traveler in the distance.

He can see rain.

It is a bridal veil against the windows, although he hadn’t remembered it raining.

But it _is_ there—

Beads of water like precious stones, glinting softly in the morning light. It falls against the glass like a whisper breathed across an ear, sirens lulling him into sleep.

He presses his hand to the glass.

_Unburned?_

The piano continues dimly, calling him like starlight does for wishes—

There are stairs.

He follows them down, and with each step he thinks it is similar, so similar to his home. The home he had before the whole world changed and he was turned inside out. The home he had before he was made of blued blood and hard whitened hands, bones he has to break when he wakes because they’ve gone stiff with rigor.

The pictures hanging on the walls are blurred, as if the faces have been erased or weren’t remembered.

Something in his mind says this is wrong, but he keeps walking.

He is dragging something— _a body?_ no, a blanket, it feels heavy though. Like he is dragging something heavy behind him, like he is pulling something with his spine.

Simon stumbles on the last step, glancing back to see—

He always missed the last step.

He bends to touch it. There are the scuff marks to prove it. Showing how he ruined it entirely after years of absent-minded abuse.

“Simon!”

He looks up, eyes closing as if the sound is shaking a pillar place inside of him. As if it was shouted down from the sky and is too big for this room.  It resonates as if coming from two places at once. Or as if there are two voices instead of one, and he can’t decipher them apart. Simon snakes his fingers into his curling soft hair, as if to massage his brain and weed out this fractured feeling.

“Simon!” says his father, with smiling eyes. “There you are.”

Simon freezes for a moment, chest tight. He drops his hands and his eyes race from the ground like a dog chases after a ball.

He is not breathing, but this tells him nothing.

“Come and sit by me, kid,” Ferdinand pats the piano bench, putting down his steaming cup of coffee on—

_The left side,_ Simon’s brain fills in.

Always the left side of the piano.

—his father’s articulate hands set down the coffee at the top left-hand corner.

But Simon doesn’t obey his request, fixated in place as if looking at something that might disappear. He searches for signs around the edges, a wave to indicate mirage.

His father’s smile is broad under his dark hair. Ferdinand has a slight build, a beige bathrobe pulled over pajamas and slippers eaten through the bottom. His glasses are just a little too big, pushed up into his hair half the time. Nails worn down to the nub from his guitar.

He looks just how Simon remembers.

“What’re you waitin’ for, famoso? A grammy?”

Simon blinks, disturbed out of his reverie.

_Simon!_

The voice hollers out again.

Simon ducks his head as if the walls around him were starting to crack. He reaches to touch them, plaster coming away with his finger.

He looks back to his father, frightened he will not be there.

But now Ferdinand is playing Joplin on the piano, the scene seeming to have changed— foot jumping playfully on the pedals. The ragtime spins in Simon’s mind like a carousel, each note seeming to push the room into a spiral. He squeezes his eyes shut again, unsettled.

Simon feels a tug on his shirtsleeve, at the cuff— a pajama cuff?

Simon isn’t sure when he had put on pajamas.

Ferdinand pulls him closer, next to him on the bench. His father’s other hand continues to play as the rain shrouds the windows, the room getting darker.

The music is happy but Simon feels a tightness in his throat.

“I’ll do the pedals—“

_“— I’ll do the keys,”_ Simon finishes prophetically, as if he’s heard it before.

Simon’s father smiles, “That’s right.”

“I miss you dad,” Simon says suddenly, as if he has to say it, like the floor is going to fall out from under them and they might never stop descending. An elevator with no up button. This room is not stationary, perhaps instead perched on the back of an animal, rocked from side to side, as it is led to its doom.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dino answers warmly. He points. “Keys. Now.”

Simon’s hands are shaking.

Fingers on the keys.

He stretches his hands. It’s easy to cross the white teeth of the piano now, fingers spread over them like braces. The last time he played with his father he had struggled to make the chords, small palms too new.

“You’re improving every day— I mean it, don’t give me that look,” says Dino, affectionately patting his back.

He is gentle.

All of his motions are soft, as if he knew the world required careful attention to make it beautiful.

He looks at Simon as if he is beautiful, too.

Simon _smiles._

He feels then like something bent has been pulled out of him, a dark root that had been growing behind his ribs and painting his insides with mold. A mirror body that puppetted him from the inside now cut of its strings.

His father smiles back, turning back to the keys. His shoulder touches Simon’s shoulder.

It is not warm.

“What is this place?” suddenly Simon’s ease is fading. He is confused, fingers slowing on the keys as if he is touching something that frightens him. “Dad— you’re dead— aren’t you?”

Simon reaches for his head again, as if he could pull it apart and find the answers. As if he knows something is wrong there but the alarms are all broken, the smoke rising to the ceiling.

He stands up from the bench, turning away for a moment and looking back.

It is different when he does.

The lights are dimmed, jaded.

“Sometimes I think I’ll never finish this,” his father gestures to a stack of papers on the music stand.

Simon remembers this, hears it twice in his head.

As if his father is saying it in his memory and again in front of him simultaneously. The echo hits the base of his brain and makes him shiver.

He pulls his arms close to his body, as if cold. As if this place will suck him dry. Like someone is sipping out his insides from a glass.

Simon _remembers_ this moment— the cool slick of night crowding against the windows as if it were a body that wanted to get inside. The kitchen light glowing like a setting sun, mellowing his father’s brown cardigan to a dull orange shell.

Ferdinand rests his forehead in his palm, eyes closing slowly.

Simon looks at the windows.

The darkness there seems personified somehow. As if it were living.

Like all it needed to do was open an eye to prove it.

“No,” Simon says, resolute, as if defiant to that darkness. He scrambles as if sensing time is warped, misbehaving. Like he could put his hand through the years like a fence. “You’ll finish it. We’ll get you out of here. I promise, dad.” He grips the empty shoulders of his father, who seems surprised. “I promise you,” Simon’s voice is strong, incredibly serious in a way he has lost for so long.

“There’s nowhere left to go,” Ferdinand answers amusedly, lips turning up as always. He is the kind of person who smiled in reaction to every emotion.

Simon shakes his head. “That’s not true, there’s other— things. Everything is real, dad. Everything.”

“Mijo, everyone who needs to get anywhere goes to New York,” he has a rueful tilt to his brows, observant and self-deprecating. “And we’re already here.”

It almost brings tears to Simon’s eyes.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff,” his father says, putting a hand against Simon’s cheek and patting kindly. He stands up, running a hand into Simon’s hair. He doesn’t seem to mind that Simon has gotten taller, different, and that the gesture is awkward and unusual now. “Don’t worry about your old man.”

“No, no tell me more,” Simon answers quickly, as if his memories are finite, as if you can use them up like money.

He doesn’t get a chance to beg.

Simon is outside the room again, walking in. There is snow on his boots.

Ferdinand is playing the Emperior’s Death March from Star Wars as soon as he sees the snow-capped Simon, bedecked like a storm trooper in fluffy white.

Simon can’t help but smile as if he’d forgotten this and laughs brightly.

“You don’t know _the power of the dark side!”_ Ferdinand holds a fist up, still playing with his other hand. Simon can hear his mother and sister coming in behind him, he can see the blurred branches of a menorah perched in the windowsill. The lamps are glowing. His mother is laughing— happy for once.

Simon runs to him, gets locked in his arm, snow everywhere like ash falling down around them.

_“Simon— “_

But then the room is empty.

Simon exhales, coughing up dust. He turns, spins in place to find he is looking at nothingness.

The piano is silent.

The music has stopped.

The room vacated, as if even the furniture were hollow, and might blow over.

Simon cannot see an inch in front of his face.

Something surrounds him like the wet depth of a kiss, forgetting form and figure. He panics, reaching out. It is like quicksand, the wave caving in above him, filling his lungs with iron and nitrogen.

Dirt. The stench of petrichor.

The whites of his eyes turn black as he claws his way to the surface— _if there is one?_

When he breaks from the hold there is only more darkness, as if he is being suffocated, shackled to swim in the black eye of a shark.

Something in him becomes beastly, animal-knowing, and there is a frightening thinness to him as he suddenly heaves against the grass. A kaleidoscope of sanguine bile and mud and venom streaming from his insides, as if all his organs have gone rotten.

His shaking hands reach for his mouth, knocking teeth from the loose jelly of his gums. His fingernails are overgrown, grey and peelings.

His eyes widen in horror, looking at his bone hands, flesh porous and poked through by worms.

The tallit around his shoulders is frayed and stained.

Simon is crawling on his hands and knees, too exhausted. He falls back, dead against the earth, looking at the sky.

His mother is standing above him. Her eyes are shallow blue, like there is nothing left in her but inches. Clary is there. She says, _I love you Simon._ She says, _I love you so much._

He thinks, _now I am finally dead._

_Now I am finally dead._

He feels the bugs move in his gut, and the holes in his skull where the pressure escapes. He feels his bones fused stiff and his muscles rigid like stone.

His heart will not beat.

The darkness encloses him like hands.

But no matter how hard he tries, he cannot sleep.

\--

When Simon finally opens his eyes, tears are an estuary at his cheeks.

He jerks back, terrified by the blood on his hands.

“You’re awake,” Raphael is saying to him, reassuring. “You’re awake now.”

Simon’s vision is blurred through a filter of pink, and Raphael’s expression looks wide behind it.

“You were dreaming, Simon,” Raphael repeats, like talking to a child. “It was only a dream.”

“What the fuck,” Simon exhales, as if he needs air, as if he needs to breathe and just can’t do this anymore. One of his hands has found his ribcage, scrapes into it like a cat looking for a yellow bird, as if trying to prove to himself that he is dead.

Or that this is not the dream instead.

Raphael looks like he inhales, but he is sitting up straighter, like animals do to look strong.

It takes him a second, but he reaches forward, and moves Simon’s hair from his eyes. Simon flinches at the touch like he forgot kind things, lashes dark and stuck together. He brings his hands up to cover his eyes.

Raphael has a hard grip around his shoulder, inescapable like the anchor of a boat.

“It’s Liànyù,” Lily says.

Simon’s wide gaze darts to her, processing his environment. She has her arms crossed, with Elliott beside her. Her expression is schooled neutral. But Elliott looks sympathetic, like he found an animal with an injury.

“Excuse me?”

“The middle place,” Elliott says not much less cryptically.

“Purgatorio,” Raphael breathes, looking at him with a steadiness that Simon, days later, will recall with gratitude.

“We’ve all been to this… neither place,” Lily says. She scrapes for the compassionate words. “It will fade— it will happen less.”

“When you are immortal,” Raphael says softly, “It’s not always the memories that haunt you— it can be the running out of them, no? Do you see that?”

Simon is trembling.

Raphael is hauling him to his feet and watching him like Simon is full of pins.

Like he knows it will hurt to pull them out.

“It… sucks,” says Raphael, the slang rolling in his mouth.

The unfamiliarity of the warm sound causes Simon to look at him, their eyes meeting once more.

Elliott deposits a large blanket around Simon’s shoulders, and the feeling of it is heavy against his frame, like he could fall under its weight. Raphael nods to the door, indicating it is time to leave.

Simon is not even sure where he is.

He looks around before they do— eyes catching the shadowed form of a dust-covered piano in the basement of the Du Mort— before Lily locks the door behind them.

She pulls it shut harshly, as if closing the gate to a place that is always in winter.

Simon feels it inside, like someone nailing the valves of his heart flat.

\--

The city lights blink across the New York skyline, they grow into the stratosphere like geometric flowers in the dark. The buildings rise, surging into the sky like flagpoles for stars.

“Ey,” Raphael snaps in front of Simon’s dazed expression, dragging his pointer finger as if it was connected by a string to Simon’s focus. “Dónde estás?”

“I’m here,” Simon responds groggily. He reaches up feebly and uses the weight of his hand to push Raphael’s down. “Being dead just caught up with me a little bit,” his smile is half-hearted, but sincere.

Raphael shifts, as if Simon’s discomfort stretches under his skin, upsetting him.

“Undead,” he corrects faintly, leaned over his knees.

The night sky is scattered like by bulbs, strung up by holiday lights.

They twinkle in between the spaces of Raphael’s body, encircling his head like a corona of glass. Simon glances towards him, face paled by the pearl moon. He likes it up here. The freedom of height, the peace of the distance. He feels like he is part of things again. Cars move like spaceships on the black ribbons of road. The air keeps secrets.

The whole world seems to float as if suspended in ink.

“What does that even mean,” Simon wonders aloud, tugging the frayed blanket around his shoulders closer.

“It means this isn’t the end,” Raphael supplies.

“What is?” Simon asks quietly. He looks towards the other, the leather over Raphael’s bent knees blanched by the city lights.

Raphael looks over.

Simon is bundled, cared for like an egg, messy hair distracting from his eyes, hidden beneath his flattened fringe.

But to Raphael, Simon’s eyes look tired.

They are tattered as if by like the knife of fear. Raphael is so often worried.

— Not only for Simon.

For the clan. Their safety. The clave’s stupidity. For the souls of the departed. For kingdom come and the lord himself should he ever grow weary. Raphael often wonders if God will age, if one day the world will bleed up blackness, like the sun had gone out.

If God will go to sleep and leave them all with their teeth and shovels.

Raphael focuses on Simon’s eyes again, drawn closer like by a sweet fruit in a tree. Despite his shredded nerves the fledgling’s curiosity still shines through.

“What is the end?” he says again. He searches Raphael’s eyes.

Raphael is always surprised by this feeling. A fullness as if someone poured something into him to his brim. He doesn’t wonder about sleeping God when he feels this way— too much seems awake.

Simon has una luz divina.

An inner light.

“I don’t know,” he answers quite plainly, as if he always wonders, too.

Simon nods knowingly, reaching his hand out.

Raphael takes it.

\--

The following sunset Simon finds his way to the messy administrative room for inventory.

“Hey,” he says, leaning in the doorway.

Elliott looks over, tossing inventory forms from one pile onto another slightly less monstrous pile.

“Hey,” he answers coolly.

Elliott is the kind of vampire who fits seamlessly into the modern aesthetic— his hair which covers his ears and unspecific features are timeless enough to blend without effort. He has teal earbuds in. Elliott’s contemporary clothes don’t look out of place on his tall frame like they do on some of the others.

“What’s up?” he asks.

Simon smiles a little at the sound, the phrase never coming off completely naturally from someone who is over a hundred years old.

“I just wanted to make sure you didn’t get in too much trouble for— you know.”

“Oh that,” Elliott remembers, as if it was already forgotten. “Raphael gave me three hundred year’s hard labor, nothing too serious.”

Simon smiles a little again.

“Or what feels like three hundred year’s hard labor— organizing last century’s inventory. You know Camille didn’t account for shit,” he says disparagingly. He is biting a pencil thoughtfully as his messy brows furrow over the impossibly fudged records from their former leader’s tenure.

Elliott is the clan member Raphael had put in charge of imports management, that is, the clan’s feeding supply and relationships with its various producers both in and out of the city. From what Simon gathers they are close, or at least Elliott feels some unparalleled loyalty towards Raphael.

Simon remembers hearing about Sarah, the vampire Elliott had loved. How she had become viciously addicted to human blood following Camille’s flagrant encouragement of wild feeding and disregard for clave law. Camille had staked her when she could no longer control herself, murdering Camille’s subjugates out of ravenous hunger, and mad with withdrawal.

She had become a liability to Madam Belcourt’s life of luxury, and a babbling addict in the face of those she loved.

Elliott had been foraging for days, only to step into her ash as he returned.

“Trust me fledgling, we are never playing blackjack with the Knox brothers again _because_ now I know you’re a lightweight who is going to fall asleep and wander off into a subdimension.”

Simon smiles a bit, his eyes still tired.

“I guess that’s fair,” says Simon. “You sure you don’t want any help?”

“Nah— hey,” Elliott whispers conspiratorially just as he’s about to leave, as if catching his tail.

Simon turns, brows climbing up in question.

“You’re still gonna teach me that card counting trick—”

“I swear,” Simon promises. “But under like— sober circumstances. Probably more reliable that way. We do want you to be able to avoid another untimely death.” Simon smiles slightly. “That’d just be overkill.”

“Good one,” says Elliott, getting it a second later and smiling back proudly, turning the music back up in his headphones.

He gives Simon a thumbs up and looks back to the endless boxes of paperwork, opening an excel file to begin the impossible task set before him.

\--

“Oh, and Lily said she’ll be back later tomorrow night, she got held up in Tarrytown checking in with the northern town hall leaders,” reports Simon. “Actually she said ‘the [expletive] boonies won’t [expletive] [expletive] be ready until tomorrow [expletive] night for our [expletive] meeting.”

“Okay,” Raphael says, satisfied. “You’re getting much better at that.”

Simon’s sharp smile cracks his lips slightly. “I’m getting a lot more practice.”

Raphael smiles a bit too, in his eyes where his smiles never really go.

“One more thing,” Raphael says. “Siéntate,” he moves his hand like he is inviting him.

Simon walks around the chair and sits, lean legs spreading uncomfortably as he starts to fidget by tapping on his knee. His dark jeans and black jacket make him look taller than he really is.

“Como estás?”

“I’m okay,” Simon reports again, somewhat less convincingly.

“You haven’t talked much about your visitando— to anyone. And I checked.”

“Creepy,” Simon comments.

Raphael is staring at him again with the eyes that aren’t completely hard and aren’t completely tired, but are more soft in intention underneath their directness.

“Don’t look at me like that,” says Simon.

“Like what?” and Raphael is pleased to at least be annoying him.

“Like all concerned and worried and like I’m gonna fall apart like some total delicate idiot.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” assures Raphael. “Aside from the total idiot part. That is true.”

Simon smirks, “Funny. You’re getting funny now.”

“I don’t think you’re delicate,” Raphael clarifies.

Simon fidgets in the chair, unsure why he is there.

Raphael looks at him again, brows coming up when he speaks as if he’s finally decided on a further response. “Do you like that piano downstairs?”

Simon stares at him for a moment. “It’s— I used to play, a little. I mean. I was learning once.”

“Good, because I had it moved into your room. Which is filthy, by the way. We may be impermeable to disease but you, muchacho, are testing the known limits,” Raphael gestures with his finger accusingly.

“You did?” Simon asks, ignoring everything else Raphael said.

“Si, para ti esta bien?”

“Yes— it is. It’s. Nice. That was nice— thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Raphael seems to genuinely enjoy saying it.

Simon reaches across the desk almost reflexively to cover Raphael’s hand.

“I’m gonna play it all day, you’re going to hate me,” Simon says, mood lifted.

“I’ll add it to the list of things I can’t stand,” says Raphael, agreeing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had sooooooooooooooooooooo much work last week this update is late! i have several more ideas for future chapters, and i also did just read only the short story "saving raphael santiago" which has given me a few lightbulbs too. i hope you liked it!! :) i appreciate the kudos thank youuuthankyouthankyou. also let me know what you think or other stuff you'd like to see!


	6. to fight is to lose, to love is to lose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neon blood electrifies a stripe down Raphael’s lip. He drags tanned knuckles across it. Death gives him pallor and it makes the red pop against his hand like color isolation in a comic book. The cut leaks like sap and reddens the straight row of his bottom teeth.

Neon blood electrifies a stripe down Raphael’s lip.

He drags tanned knuckles across it.

Death gives him pallor and it makes the red pop against his hand like color isolation in a comic book. The cut leaks like sap and reddens the straight row of his bottom teeth.

He looks disappointed.

Shaking his head, he encroaches on Simon with several predatory steps.

“You can do better than that _baby_ ,” Raphael goads.

Simon’s expression is annoyed, hair fallen in front of his eyes like a dog.

The room is awash in draining fluorescents, the sharp white filter making Simon’s irises gleam. They appear a scathing yellow instead of an amiable brown.

But even death does not thieve away exhaustion, and with every passing moment Simon finds himself more tired— the hours have swooped by under Raphael’s fists, his careful hands positioning Simon’s legs, his direct, demanding tone ringing against the walls like a shout across a mountain, continually crashing back into Simon in echo.

_De nuevo, Simon!_

Raphael is catching his fists in midair and pushing him backwards. Simon is stumbling, scraping to his feet. And then he is sliding, weight distributed, so that he does not fall again— catching his position, evening his stride.

Raphael grins, bottom teeth stained pink. He hits Simon’s hip with the sharp crop of his wrist — calling attention to yet another flaw in positioning, something that Simon let slip while he was correcting his footwork.

_Se llama a que la lucha?_

Raphael taunts, raising his brows.

The older vampire actually smiles, a slick smile as if this, more than most things, makes him feel alive.

It is in this way that Simon learns Raphael’s arrogance is a weapon, and that Raphael loves his weapons like a soldier does. As if they were not meant only as tools of fighting, but instead were part of him like an organ is. They are not forgotten after war quiets into innocence— but meant to be hung upon mantles, to be cleaned, and cherished, and passed down.

Inscribed con su nombre.

_Raphael Juan Miguel Santiago._

It is letter by letter some kind of brand in Simon’s footwork and his scraped up hands.

Like so that people might look at Simon and not forget where he came from.

Raphael is raising his brows, looking Simon up and down in critical assessment, before turning away to grab a drink.

Somehow his hair is still perfect after what seems like a long century of intense, frustrating training on the other’s part.

It exasperates the fledgling and Simon attempts to upperkick him as a sucker shot while he is turned away.

Raphael grabs his foot, spins it harshly and sends Simon directly to the ground, where Simon lands with a hard smack on his shoulder— rolling away only milliseconds before he realizes Raphael is about to send the heel of his shoe into Simon’s sternum.

Simon’s fangs cut through his gums without permission, blood diluting like watercolor down his teeth. He can feel the pools of his eyes blacken.

Simultaneously his fingers are splayed, nails pointed. There is blood at his nail beds from where they extended. His body is new to all this outgrowth, raw and vibrant like pubescence.

He stands, angrily, looking at his counterpart like a bright urchin blooming with spines.

“Bueno,” Raphael says finally, the lines of his expression deep in observation, catching the hard blow of Simon’s surprise jab in his hand. Raphael’s bicep strains against all the force Simon could muster. “Pero, good isn’t good enough, baby.”

Simon’s arm is lifted in tension, trying to push his all strength into dislocating Raphael’s stance.

It is not working.

His eyes color back into brown.

“ _Fuck,”_ he breaths in defeat, as he slowly loses ground.

“If you were en los barrios, you’d be dead,” Raphael announces dismissively, shoving him back with a power that causes Simon’s feet to scramble after one another. “ _Double dead._ Ahora hacerlo mejor,” he commands. He claps sharply in front of his body. “ _Do it better_.”

Simon exhales heatedly, the tension growing his shoulders. The flush of burning in his chest claims ground like a brushfire. He swings and Raphael slaps his hand away, the clack of it striking the air like a whip. Raphael does not posture in aggression, only defense, continually blocking Simon’s blows, avoiding his attacks with masterful ease.

“Come on,” he insists. “I can’t protect you forever,” he is smiling, tipping his head teasingly.

Simon hisses, surprised by the sound himself—

It leaps up from his throat like a bird trying to claw its way out of his ribs.

Raphael laughs.

“Tengo tan mieda.”

“Fight club reference number one— _fuck you_ ,” Simon breaths, taking a risk by taking a breather, pacing tiredly. He looks rigid when aroused, fangs glinting, eyes dilated, claws sharp— uncomfortable in his own skin.

Raphael smiles again.

“Don’t be sore, _baby_. I wouldn’t leave you to the wolves. You know I could never let anything happen to mi novatito.”

Simon nods condescendingly, not totally on the level with Raphael’s apparent good mood. But he supposes if he kicked someone’s ass for five straight hours he might also feel invincible and infuriating.

“Please, you’d be miserable without me. I say jump and you—“

“Ask who do I kill?” Raphael says gamely, grinning.

“Exactly,” Simon huffs, “So don’t pretend you don’t get off on the whole— Godfather-thing.”

Raphael’s brows bend and he makes a face, “What? You’re funny.”

Simon steps closer, the movement bringing him just slightly too near into Raphael’s personal space.

“Come ‘ere,” Simon suggests, his voice soft in the room like he has a secret to tell.

It beckons like a breeze.

Raphael is pulling the athletic bottle from his lips, mouth ruby red and bright with blood.

Simon’s tone draws his eyes down to his lips, like a leash pulls an animal to heel.

“Que quieres, mi pequeña distracción?” he asks, voice quieter too.

“Te quiero,” Simon answers, mouth curling up like a scythe in one corner.

Raphael’s eyes go half lidded, and he approaches. He looks handsome, in white, an unfamiliar color on him that offsets the sallowness to his skin and gives Simon an idea of his appearance in life. Tones strong like the sun and deep like clay from the earth.

“Me quieres?”

“Si, ven aqui guapo,” Simon grins.

Raphael grins back, closing the space in between them—

And suddenly Simon is on the ground again with a startling slam.

“Oh come on!” complains Simon.

“You really think that was going to work on me?” Raphael says amusedly, pride stretching its wings above him like a bird. “You know I am above the feeble-minded impulses that control you people como los animales.”

Simon rolls his eyes, brushing his arms off as he stands up. As he does so he reaches for Raphael’s ankle, using all his strength to pull him off his feet.

It’s Raphael’s turn to be looking at the ceiling.

Simon smiles triumphantly over him, plan a success.

The look of surprise on Raphael’s face morphs quickly to pride.

He reaches up and grabs the hem of Simon’s shirt, easily and quickly pulling him down. Simon’s knees bend from the force of his tug, his legs spreading around his body, straddling his hips.

“What were you saying about ‘us people’ a minute ago?” Simon asks smilingly.

“Callate,” Raphael answers.

Simon does.

He leans down to kiss him. Raphael’s mouth is warm. It reminds Simon of the beach, an ocean in the summer and knots in his hair because he feels destressed and free. He feels heat from his throat to his groin when he pulls away, like Raphael has infected with him with the late lingering nights of deep July.

“Where did you get that?”

“Hm?” says Raphael, content to be in his own mind with his hands gripped over Simon’s hips.

“That scar,” Simon elaborates, tracing a thumb down the line at his cheek.

Raphael’s brows bend, black like a cat arching its back.

“My father hit me once in Zacatecas,” he answers. “He never did again.”

“That’s horrible,” Simon says, eyes flashing in the effort to imagine any such scenario.

Raphael thinks briefly of the night his father perished. The swift blow of his knuckles against Raphael’s face. His words, _one day you will know what I have done for you_. Raphael had blacked out in the car from the pain, unable to avenge his father’s honor in that burning house. It disappeared like a balloon does in the sky as they sped away. Raphael had been dizzy, unattached. He watched it until it was a speck, until it blinked away like a star in the darkness.

Despite their resentful and distanced relationship, Raphael’s heart would have sent him to die that night— that was the nature of Raphael’s soul, to die for a man he had never even loved.

There was a time when he would have bragged, talked vagaries around why his father never put his hands on him again. A time when he had covered his anguish and doubt in bravado. Even a time he had reveled in his father’s death, in frustration having convinced himself he would have killed him had destiny not intervened.

But that was long ago, and to Raphael now death meant little.

All talk of closure gone stale with the decades.

“Bajate,” says Raphael, patting Simon’s leg so that he gets off.

“I didn’t mean to—“

“You didn’t,” Raphael assures. “Go wash up. You look horrible, querido.”

Simon keeps eyes on him for a second, as if studying.

Raphael raises his brows, they climb his forehead in bored flippancy.

Simon’s mouth twists in response. He ducks his head, shaking off his thoughts, as he picks up his sweatshirt from the ground.

“Don’t querido me,” scolds Simon under his breath, holding back the urge to run out of the training room for loss of cool effect.

\--

Juan Carlos was a solider under command of capitán Santiago, the closest confidant of his father and loyal lieutenant after the ousting of Medero. He, along with Santiago, took lead positions in the federal army following various coups after the insurrection, becoming what fellow rebels saw as in league with the enemy. Sell outs, they spat, for the toxic gold of Cortez— theirs were poisoned hearts, perhaps now powerful men but the disgrace de la revolución and all it had stood for.

To Raphael Carlos had always been known as _tío_ , his most beloved personage.

“ _Tío!_ ” Raphael had called, running down the steps of the villa to the grand dust circle where the gleaming car had sputtered in the hot summer sun.

Carlos stepped from the passenger seat, the smell of gasoline punching the air like a red boxing glove. The buttons on his uniform glowed brightly in the sun like coins. The glimmering sword at his belt shined like lightning.

He left the car door open, losing propriety as he opened his arms wide.

“Dónde está Raphael?” he asked perplexedly.

Raphael smiles breathlessly as he approaches, the sun hot against his forehead. “Soy yo!”

“Impossible,” Carlos laughs. He gestures in evidence. “The Raphael knew looks nothing like this man right here— step out of the way so I can see him. He must be behind you somewhere.”

Raphael leaps down the cobbled wall and runs the rest of the distance, straight into his welcoming arms.

“Mi vida, es verdad. It is you. Dios, I am still getting old,” Carlos smiles.

“Te he echado de menos,” says Raphael, hugging him tightly.

“I have missed you too, hombre,” he answers, pulling him close.

Guadalupe is smiling on the steps, giving them a giant overarching wave, like an aeroplane through the sky. She looks like a doll in the distance, her bright blue dress the color of the sea in Yucatan.

Carlos smiles— he is handsome, not tall in stature but lean and strong. He takes the suitcase from the driver, offering him clean new money that makes crisp sounds as it shifts against itself. He slaps several bills in Raphael’s hands. “That’s for you.”

“Pero—“

“Don’t you give it away to no one, comprendes?”

Raphael holds the brightly printed papers in his hands, not knowing what to say.

“Use it for your hair,” Carlos says, playfully pointing to Raphael’s slicked hair.

Raphael rolls his eyes. “Looks better than yours, abuelo.”

Carlos laughs. “Come on now, be kind to me. I still have a full head— that’s all that counts with las chicas,” he jokes.

Raphael looks at him flatly, “No, it isn’t.”

Carlos laughs again, pointing at him as if he knows more than most. “Sometimes I worry about us all when you come of age, Raphael. Whatever will we do when we cannot lie to ourselves any longer? Speaking of which— I heard about your disagreement with Comisionado Ramon,” Carlos says, arm swung around Raphael’s shoulders as they walk towards the house.

Raphael’s expression twists, black brows bending. “You heard about that?”

“Si, si, I did,” Carlos says, his voice has a melodic lull to it, rasping and attractive. “I was so _proud_ of you,” he grins.

Raphael laughs a little, looking down.

Carlos tips his chin back up.

“You’re a fighter, mijo. Always be proud of that,” he is serious, and Raphael tilts his chin up spiritedly, in response. “Exactemente!”

When they approach Guadalupe throws her arms around the shoulders of Juan Carlos, and Raphael smiles to see her so happy. She slips her hand into Carlos’s gloved palm and leads him to the front door. Raphael’s brothers sound like birds inside, shrieking their happiness.

Of course, as always, he brought los regalos from Distrito Federal.

His brothers fight excitedly over which they get, saying their gracias after Raphael reminds them with a stern look. They giggle rambunctiously, putting fake mustaches to their faces and playing with paddles and model airplanes on the waxed wood floor.

“How I have missed you, Carlitos,” Guadalupe says adoringly.

“You are even more beautiful than I remember, Lupita,” he returns, taking his hat off. “And more brilliant, no doubt.”

She smiles.

They look framed in the doorway of the kitchen, like they were one of his mother’s paintings come alive.

“You must make it up for the rest of us, no? Come to la capital. Fix this mess,” he gestures with his hand good-humoredly, making her laugh. “I am tired of it. Todos estos hombres y their complaints y complaints. I need to take my boots off and forget about it forever.”

“Oh, cielos, you must be so tired from your travels,” she says apologetically. “Chiquitos, perdonanos,” she walks through her youngest sons, leading Carlos to the stairway and its bright white lacquer.

“I will be back soon, promiso,” he jokes. He looks to Raphael. “The man of the house going to show me the way?”

Raphael stands up a little straighter at the gift of title, and smiles at his mother while he leads his tío up the stairs.

Her black eyes are happy half-moons as she watches them ascend the villa—  Zacatecas which is not el inferno today, but heaven instead.

\--

“Hey, ven aqui,” says Carlos, gesturing as Raphael turns to leave from the shaded room. It is painted a pale blue on the upper floor, airy and clean. The light from the window throws patches of shaded flowers on the bed and floor.

Raphael turns at his excited tone.

Carlos is opening up his suitcase, the shiny metal hooks clacking loudly as they unclasp. He digs through various articles until he finds a long plain box, tan and undecorated.

Raphael raises an eyebrow.

“It’s an early present,” he says happily.

“Por qué?”

“Por tu cumpleaños, idiota,” Carlos answers with mock indignance, knocking his shoulder with the box a bit. “Happy Birthday.”

“It’s not my birthday for another five months,” says Raphael critically.

“That’s why I said it was early,” Carlos insists. “Do I pass the inquisition, Comisionado Raphael?”

Raphael stares at it another minute. He is looking down, now gesturing to the pocket he has filled with Carlos’s money. “But what about the—“

“That’s for navidad, come on,” he says emphatically, dismissing it.

Raphael looks up at him skeptically, but then finally takes the box, moving to the bed to open it up.

Despite himself, he starts to feel excitement as he opens the cover, unfolding the cloth inside

He catches site of the silver glint first.

It is a gun.

It sits in the bed of soft blue fabric, swathed preciously like a baby.

“What’s wrong?” says Carlos after a moment.

Raphael schools his expression, covering the box quickly, the gleam to the nickel shut off under the shade.

“Nada, es perfecto,” he answers quickly, giving Carlos a small smile. He hugs him fast, walking to leave the room with the box. “Muchos gracias, tío.”

Pulling his gloves off, Carlos watches after him thoughtfully.

The sun begins to bend in the sky, dipping towards the horizon.

Raphael’s shadow thins in front of the door and disappears from sight.

\--

He is quiet all of dinner, the orange geometry of the candelight warm against his cheeks.

He pays mind to the conversation, hearing his mother’s vivid, breathless descriptions of her correspondence with artists in the old world. She speaks with such conviction she could weave a flag from her words, spirited hands casting shadows against the wall while the imported Spanish wine Carlos gifted them slowly drains in her glass.

It is like blood, bringing her back to life.

Tío is attentive, almost astounded by her.

He sits lazily in the seat, as if he were himself at home. His dark eyes follow her with sincerity and interest, asking questions and pointing out inconsistencies he has heard about her painter friends in France.

She laughs, dismissive of his wry comments. Still in her eyes Raphael can recognize the light that comes from appreciation, like a candle flickering joyfully within.

Raphael has been drinking, too. He is nearly fourteen.

For a moment Raphael imagines Carlos is his father.

He imagines this house is his and his parents are in love and his home is safe and happy. He imagines his brothers trailing tío in the morning, begging for his attention instead of his own.

“Gustavo sends his regards, of course,” Carlos says languidly, sliding his glass over the table cloth.

Guadalupe blinks, as if woken up from a dream.

“Si, I send him my love.”

Carlos watches her for a moment, expression unreadable. He sits up and drags the napkin down his red mouth, folding it caringly as he presses it back to the table.

His mother gets up from the table, rubbing a soft hand to the spot between her brows. She says something about dessert. His brothers cheer happily— treats are not uncommon, but not common. They love when tío comes to visit. Carlos’s eyes follow her hollowly as she walks into the warm distance of the kitchen, not glancing back.

Raphael watches him.

His eyes turn to Raphael after a moment, presently and kindly.

“You’ve been quiet, hm,” he comments, absentmindedly straightening his silverware.

“What’s the point of talking if you have nothing relevant to say,” Raphael responds.

“To talk is merely a – social activity, or so they tell me,” Carlos says. As always, however, he seems interested in Raphael’s opinion.

“That’s what stupid people do. They are all empty in their own cabezas and talk to fill up el vacío between their ears. If no one spoke when it did not matter it would be more obvious when it does.”

Carlos laughs lowly, thoroughly amused.

“I wish I could say such things in la capital,” he yearns. “Perhaps I am not brave enough for such— honesty. That is the problem with el gobierno. Yes, so you feel passion for a cause. But la pasión makes not for law and order, Raphael. Some would like to believe so, but that is not la verdad. Things change. No longer the wolf, you seek to become el gato. Always listening, bending around objects. Sometimes I think we would be better served by los acrobatas.”

Raphael looks over, interest piqued by the free manner through which Carlos speaks to him about his experiences, as if he respects Raphael as his equal. “That’s not true, tio. You are the bravest man I have ever met.”

Carlos looks over, hands clasped between his legs. Raphael is bigger than he remembers. Grown. The thought comes to him that time slips through them all like sand in glass. The orange in Raphael’s tawny skin is scorched warmly by the candlelight— he always seems to glow. Raphael is a north star, a presence like a rock.

“I am sorry about the gift,” he says.

Raphael’s eyes turn away when he does. He looks down to his plate as if continuing to eat.

“I am not upset with you. I only thought maybe you would like to have your first—” he trails off. Carlos’s intent is reinvigorated as he says, “But I see now what you really want is to learn how to fight like a man of honor.”

Raphael’s expression changes minutely, as he turns to look towards his tío again.

“Tomorrow. First light,” he promises, his eyes deep with the strength of night.

\--

Simon opens his eyes, spine curled like a fox. The moonlight crosses into the room like mist, silver but dispersed. Raphael has the soft yellowed lights on in one corner of the room.

Simon stretches contentedly, hair mussed up against the black silk of Raphael’s pillows. He reaches to find his shirt in the disorder of the covers.

“What’re you doing?” Simon asks inquisitively, as he pulls on his t-shirt. He stands from sitting at the edge of the bed, walking barefoot to Raphael. He puts his hands over the older vampire’s shoulders easily, as if they belonged touching him.

“Soon los días de los muertos arrives,” Raphael says succinctly.

Simon looks at the small figurines— Raphael is not elaborate by nature, but the colors strike his eyes happily. Bright oranges of marigold, singing reds, laughing blues. They bring to mind a contradiction— introverted Raphael and gold karat caskets, his embroidered jackets, his slick snakeskin boots.

“Oh yeah,” Simon says, like remembering. “Tell me,” he asks respectfully. “We don’t really have it— I’m not Mexican.”

“Las calacas,” Raphael says, placing the animated, brightly painted skeletons in a precise visual direction. “Las calaveras,” he explains of the colorful skulls decorated with ornate artistic vibrancy. “Obviously this is an altar,” he says plainly. “This is la catrina,” he points towards a skeleton in a dress and a wide brimmed hat. She is smiling brightly. “She was something of a political joke against the wealthy a long time ago, but my mother thought it was el sexismo to think so. She always liked her— she said only a lady would have the poise to rise from death and brush off her capota.”

Simon smiles.

“It is the celebration of the purest kind of love,” Raphael offers uncharacteristically.

Simon is caught off guard, not ever having heard Raphael speak of love, or anything soft or shuttered.

“What do you mean?”

“To love one in death— that is the truest of all loves,” Raphael says. “There is nothing for you but memory, and still you wish them well. You thank them for their life, the continuation of what lives in you. It is perspective and kindness and happiness. It is acknowledgement of the joy we must keep and the great past that makes us. A celebration of those departed. For the world – the realm of the living— it is truly made up of ghosts.”

Raphael says it pleasantly, such a thought being comforting.

Simon watches Raphael speak, the way he has created such a beautiful conglomeration of color and light. He thinks this is what Raphael’s insides must look like— lit up by candles and stuffed with flowers.

Simon’s mind skips to a memory of his own father, looking at the artful altar and Raphael’s careful hands rearranging pieces.

“We must never forget our dead,” Raphael finishes. “The honorable dead,” he amends, his expression darkening somewhat as he corrects himself. “Those at peace con el Rey.”

_Not us_ , Simon thinks.

That’s what Raphael means, _not us_.

“This is my mother,” Raphael shares, holding the single picture of her, she is next to a man who seems older than her. “One of my brothers died some years ago,” he explains of another photo, in black and white. The boy— the man, is young. Handsome and similar to Raphael in the eyes. He is wearing a uniform. “I tried to stop him, but he went to Eisenhower’s war in Vietnam. Pero, Francisco stopped listening to me long before that— he felt betrayed by what I did. Leaving them for this.”

_Hiding._

Raphael places the picture reverently.

Simon wants to say something, to quell Raphael’s guilt and flap it away like smoke. But he does not know the pieces of the story, the parts that make it whole. “Who is that?” he asks, of another picture. The last.

Raphael is silent for a moment, looking at the photograph and placing it in the spot he created.

“My father,” he answers.

Simon looks at it.

The person in the picture does not resemble the man in the gallery painting he saw months ago. Simon thinks of Luke. He thinks of people who matter, who give themselves to you when the world leaves you shivering like a kitten. Starving.

“He seems cool,” Simon says lightly.

Raphael smiles a bit, forgetting his morose mood for something more lighthearted. The spirit of the décor brightening him in a different way.

“Muy,” Raphael agrees.

Simon smiles a bit again. He runs his hand into Raphael’s hair as he stands up, kissing his temple.

Raphael’s eyes close contentedly.

\--

“What is the first rule of war?”

Raphael is squinting in the dawn light, as if he was not made for such things.

He stands barefoot in the grass, the screaming of birds echoing across the wide field to the humid border of the jungle.

Raphael holds his fists up in response, looking at Carlos who stands several paces before him.

“ _Incorrecto,”_ he calls loudly. “The first rule of all war is to _love_ ,” Carlos insists.

Raphael listens, hands dropping. “Love?”

“Love is what inspires la gente to change, and what stops us from destruction. It is God's truest weapon besides la verdad. It is the only thing you need to win – to stop—a war,” he amends, looking at the boy before him. “To do any of this, you must make the world fall in love, Raphael.”

Raphael watches him, Carlos’s silhouette is striking in the new light of the morning.

 “Y con el amor,” he continues. “You separate yourself from the beast within. It is the only armor which can do this. Be wary this shield does not fray-- as it is only the beast within what can defeat a man who has love."

“If that is so, why can love itself not defeat a man?” Raphael says wisely, free to challenge him. To think.

“Good question, mi estudiante,” Carlos considers, ready with his answer. “You will learn that the reason is con el amor— even when you lose, you succeed beyond all mortal expectations. On the contrary, the loveless man will never see victory. The loveless man is instead at war with himself, and will never know God’s purpose for him.”

Raphael listens to this seriously.

Carlos brandishes his sword quickly and without warning, and Raphael stumbles back in the pale light, startled. His breathing is shallow at the point of the weapon.

“Rule numero dos,” Carlos says. “Never be afraid.”

Raphael inhales, looking up from the bright argentine sword, black eyes on Carlos.

“Fear is something they put into you, Raphael. The only thing any man should fear is God. The rest is blasphemy,” Carlos replaces the weapon.

The sun climbs over the thick canopy of trees at the far edge of the estate. Cicadas screech in the bushes like engines readying for a race.

“And what is the last rule?” Carlos asks brightly. Raphael can finally see the dark brown of his eyes, the sun cresting the top of his hair, haloing him with gold.

“Learn from the past?” Raphael suggests.

“Si, and what do we learn from the past?”

Raphael looks at him without an answer.

Carlos approaches Raphael, actually kneels before him in the thick dew.

He grabs hold of Raphael’s arms in the dim light, and from a distance they look statuesque. Silhouetted and dark. Like a soldier knelt before a new king.

“That people will take _advantage_ of you,” Carlos says passionately, care brimming in his eyes. He is speaking deep into Raphael’s soul, like his words were arrows meant to find in him his most remembering place. His grip tightens on Raphael’s arms and Raphael looks down at him, drawn in by his words and expression. “ _‘Behold I am sending you out like sheep among los lobos,’_ ” he quotes Mateo 10:16, a verse Raphael has cherished in church. “Be wise como serpientes,” he presses Raphael’s chest, over his heart. “Y innocent like the doves.”

“Gracias, tio,” says Raphael.

“Por supuesto, mijo.”

Raphael looks at Carlos for several moments longer.

The silhouette changes suddenly.

Raphael hugs him in the middle of the field.

The cool mist of morning parting around them like a sea.

\--

“Raphael!”

“No,” Raphael calls back from inside his office.

Simon bursts in seconds later, completely undeterred.

“Look what I found,” he says happily, excitement gushing from him.

Raphael looks up, beleaguered. “What did you find, Simon.”

“Tiger blood!”

“That is not tiger blood,” Raphael responds without so much as a second look.

“ _Uh,_ yes it is!”

Raphael stares him straight in the eyes.

“Where did you get tiger blood.”

“Apparently Elliott knows someone down in veterinary at the Bronx Zoo and they were doing routine testing this morning,” he smiles brightly. “And voila,” he says, flicking the bag showily. “Tiger blood.”

Raphael thinks of a dozen more unmoved responses, but glances up to see Simon’s impossibly happy face, nearly overflowing with the thrill he is trying to affect on Raphael.

He exhales.

The words from another life return, dusted off as if with the soon-arriving holiday.

_Even when you lose, you win._

He does not have the chance to argue with himself, to have his head tell his heart such things are reserved for feelings of—

—before Simon snatches his hand and pulls him out of the seat, leading him over to the bar.

Simon wants to know his opinion on the Rogue One: Star Wars trailer.

And he wants specific details.

Raphael suddenly thinks of his tío, uniform in the colors of las calacas.

The image of him rises in his mind as certain as if he were standing here himself.

Undoubtedly he is laughing at Raphael in en el cielo, as he is now in memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was sooooo excited to write this chapter! i know it's an early update but i thought it'd post it because the last one was late, so you get two this week :D it was definitely my favorite to write so far. and im excited about my ideas for the next one too! raphael might be in trouble in the next chapter. i hope everyone has a joyful and reverent día de muertos in the next weeks. RAPHAELLLL SIMOOONNNN. that is all. lol! ps there is a line from "saving raphael santiago" in there - i am going to put a few more easter eggs in now that i've read it.


	7. turning saints into the sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon’s eyelids grow heavy as he watches the candles— long uniform flames bursting to the ceiling like butane. They are arranged in the shape of a cross.

Simon’s eyelids grow heavy as he watches the candles— long uniform flames bursting to the ceiling like butane. They are arranged in the shape of a cross.

From where he rests against the headboard it looks like a torch, like a stack of golden spears standing upright.

They rest on the altar Raphael has carefully constructed.

Marigolds spill in dense bundles across the table. They spill from its edges like a waterfall of copper. They are bright orange mouths, opening wide. The symbol of the swirling Aztec sun.

In his comfort, Simon’s eyes narrow further closed.

He tries to imagine the scent of the flowers as the sweet touch of morning, little orbs fanning out like waves of heat from a nucleic center. They burst from their middles like the bulb of summer when it hangs in the sky.

He thinks about summer and how he will miss it.

His eyes sweep across the altar.

Three levels, Raphael had explained.

The first nivele for the heavens and those who God kept. A second for purgatorio and the tears there long wept. And finally, the last was left for the land of the living— those who waited and were fated.

Simon had wondered when Raphael spoke— on which did they stand? The vampires.

He wonders now too, as the candlelight tucks a sheer swath of gold beneath his chin. It warms his frozen limbs from their palette of scrapes and bruises— tired purples and mortuary blues.

Instead of wan, he looks honeyed.

He looks prized in the glow— rich, and blessed like a wiry prince with his erratic hair forming a crown of black atop his head. His eyes are liquid in the cast of warm light, welcoming and dark. Simon belongs in the underworld now, smiling young king— perhaps— one day.

He will be the one the dead things find.

Maybe this is why Raphael’s heart is so fixated on him. Why Raphael has been so disoriented. Something in him discomforted. His head spinning like a compass bereft of polarity. Raphael’s fangs rise against his lip at the thought of being overcome.

Raphael thinks of the things asleep in permafrost and how they wake to the thawing of the sun.

_Do not say these things out loud._

Simon’s body casts lean shadows down the wall. The light flickers, and his silhouette disappears and reappears from where he sits, like a magic trick.

When Raphael enters the room he looks slicked by gold, as if painted over and warmed from his insides. Like he tries to stuff the glimmer beneath shackles of black. Simon watches him from the bed. Simon watches the movement of his fingers as he unhooks the buttons of his jacket. He watches him peel the skin of velvet from his shoulders like a python, breathing after shedding its skin.

He avoids asking Raphael where he thinks the night children stand—which level of the altar, mythic or moral.

Simon is not sure about damnation – the thought has been surfacing in his mind— if they _were_ damned why then did the blood make things so simple? Why was this new breathlessness such a reprieve for his anxious chest and its clenching bones? And why, most of all, did the dreamless nights give him clemency from nightmare? Those terrible mouths on the edges of reality that tear apart pieces of who he is— and eat them, saying, _mine now._

Yes, transition can been merciful sometimes. Simon has thought this.

Quivering, enervated Simon.

Simon with the dark crown and the sharp teeth, and the shadow now, under his smile.

Lately, Simon feels the hollowness in his body, but instead of being afraid, he shouts in his mind down into his core. He likes how his voice echoes back as if nothing is there. As if all his mistakes have been taken back. As if all the hurting things have been run out of a cave where he can now take shelter from danger.

He thinks, maybe this was meant to be.

He thinks, the years were stretched out like curses, so that they could meet.

He said so drunkenly one night and Raphael’s eyes had snapped to him, hard like darts, and fallen down again seconds later.

Simon had felt pinned like a butterfly by that look.

He had preened, in his inebriated colors, like a bird stretching its wings. He was calling Raphael’s scrutiny. Asking for him like with curled fingers.

Careful Raphael had not looked again.

Despite this, something in the moment had lingered.

Raphael closes his eyes easily as Simon babbles and whispers late into their mingled nights. Simon never runs out of things to say. Simon’s hands always find Raphael’s hair, and Simon’s breath touches his shoulder. A reminder of warmth until morning.

At clan meetings Simon gets swooped into dustdevils of his own thought, gesturing wildly like he is wrangling words with a lasso. But Raphael listens carefully, eyes trained on him until Simon is free of the thought. Raphael considers Simon's words seriously, and Simon feels like, with these people, he has a voice worth being listened to. And If Simon seems to nervously fret over any small thing,  and wrings his musician’s hands as he searches inside Raphael’s eyes for comfort, Raphael gives it.

_Querido,_ Raphael says, _— me estas dando un dolor de cabeza._

Simon is the annoyance he would rather not lose.

Because of this, Simon has come to think certain things.

Things like, perhaps, in Raphael’s most rusted spaces, the parts of him that are calcified and cured, Raphael does not accept his fate, either.

Why else would he try so hard to rule their hell,—

—but pray in sight of all the demons?

Simon smiles a little, thinking of this, head leaned back on the dark mahogany of Raphael’s bed.

He is proud of him.

Simon’s eyes are black like bandits, ringed by dark circles, as if he were an outlaw.

Something is changing in Simon.

A comfort that coils in his gut and through his veins like a serpent hibernating for winter. A scaled thing living beneath his skin that makes him strong, like scales do for lizards against the sun.

There is something hardening his bones.

Blood pools in his stomach after eating.

Weeks pass by and his body remembers how to mechanize.

His brain is putting the pieces together again.

In this quiet moment, he thinks of Clary and blinks tiredly, as if her vivacity exhausts him. He thinks of Isabelle and her red smile like a maw of a lion, stretched in exclamation. He thinks of Raphael and his black eyes and cold hands, like a quill had bled him through paper— and nothing more need be said. Raphael has appeared, unintentionally, beneath all the meticulous lists of his dreams.

Simon’s comic books have a simple narrative: that life becomes better— darker, maybe— but never worse.

_It does not count as damnation when your soul is taken from you._

And if it does?

Maybe one day, then, Raphael will have to beg his God for Simon’s ticket del cielo.

Raphael with his thorns, fallen to his knees at last.

Leather sullied by dust and gold dimmed.

Yes, maybe Raphael will have words that will spare him. He will fall apart like dropped glass in front of his truth, and Simon will stand by, thinking that he loves him.

Maybe Raphael has cards to play, even in front of his king.

And if it is the other way around?

If Simon will have to speak for himself— explain to his own maker that he thought the ink had dried on Yom Kippur, so there he had signed on the dotted line: _toyt_.

_Dead._

Off the books.

And now he could not leave this place, these people, even if it were asked of him.

Simon thinks he could trick a man, even a demon— but a god? A god will take work. A god will take experience. Perhaps if they both stay dead long enough, they will grow silver tongues in the cold and the shadows.

And they will have no need to fear a gate or locks ever again.

He watches the flames reflect off the crystals of the sugary pan de muerto. He imagines them as they should be, bones of the deceased piled up in small mounds.

Simon gets hungry when he thinks of bones now, like a dog does in alleyways behind restaurants.

He thinks his mind is catching up with the evolution of his body.

When he thinks of life now— pulsating shopping districts in Soho, loud traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge, bicyclists and runners down by Battery Park— his stomach growls.

_Nothing left to fight anymore._

His eyes scan the bright papel picado dangling like a banner above Raphael’s altar. Hole-punched papers in lively color, empty spaces smiling through in the shapes of skulls.

Simon waits for the dead to arrive.

Raphael says he will know them by the way their spirits jostle the papel like a breeze upon reentrance to the world.

The fledgling feels the incense permeating his body, as if now that he is dead his form was something thin and vacant. The heady, floral scent hangs in the air like thread pulled to unify the heavens and the earth. As if reality has been stitched together, this one night, and he is both the old and new Simon— can see through himself and back.

Salt sits in bright dishes on the altar to purify and ward away unwanted guests.

Simon had watched Raphael setting up the space, piece by piece. He had not touched the salt, as if it would have blistered him.

Simon wanted to kiss him.

To turn his palms over and show him no burn marks were there.

But Raphael’s scars are all inside, Simon decides— apart from the one like a tear down his cheek. As if marking him for all to see. The teardrop boy in a leather jacket with eyes like knives. Simon decides, that scar was a flag planted deep in Raphael's soul by something which had claimed it like a country.

Simon’s eyes close as he looks to the picture of Raphael’s mother, surrounded by glowing velas.

Red rosary beads hang on the frame like drops of blood.

In black and white, her eyes seem to stare back.

They seem to say,

_I see you._

\--

The apartment is dark, and the enclosed space reminds Raphael of people standing too near to you on the street, spurring unease. He moves through the halls like he is walking through a crowd, dodging unexpected corners and ends, moving around obstructions.

It has been a month since Zacatecas and Mama is not doing well.

The sounds of the city never stop— and his brothers turn restlessly at night, crammed into the same bed, rubbing tears from their eyes. They are both excited and scared, too young to understand and old enough to adjust. Raphael makes up stories about the city to help them sleep, tells them fantastic monsters creep in the sewers and little mice that speak as people do grant wishes from dreaming heads.

They smile, relieved Raphael has not changed.

Calmed.

Their new home— and this is what Raphael insists on calling it— could not be more different than the last.

La Méjico was inhalation.

Their villa in the bosom of the country had been a sacred place where others would come to wash the grime from their hands. An oasis to the tarried soul, where his mother guarded the gate. Raphael remembers seeing the earth breathe in the sway of the jungle trees, and how the sound of parrots crying in the canopies would shoot through the estate like screaming fireworks— so wide and clean was the space.

New York is dimmed and enshrouded.

It is a secret wrapped in mist— the cold Atlantic coiling like a viper around the island of Manhattan.

The buildings rise like stacked tombstones, one up against the other. They are as tall as the giants from his brothers’ storybooks, with long shadowed capes that drape across the cityscape as the sun turns down.

Raphael realizes for the first time that he has been sheltered.

That he has been innocent.

His father had pierced the forbidden fruit with a bullet, and they were cast out of the garden to America.

Raphael does not recognize many of the languages spoken in New York.

He has to peer into the faces of the people speaking to make up ideas of what they could be. Money disappears now. Certain people stick tightly to what and who they know. Cultures and pasts are throw together like gum, some becoming inseparable in the pursuit of survival.

Raphael is educated— sees through a lens of experience.

He sees people lured by promises of prosperity, working in factories, who will scrape for respect until generations follow. He sees the economics of poverty, recognizes the patterns of political wedging, how elections will be stacked with the votes of la gente trying to glean freedom from dreams--- how men like Comisionado Ramon will pull together nice white suits of their grief.

Comisionado Ramon who assuredly walks the hallways of el palatio now, shining sword at his side. But the weapon is only decoration, a symbol of his rank. Raphael knows now he has been a killer of men nonetheless.

Raphael thinks of America’s Great War.

The use of patriotism and inclusion narratives to enlist those on the outskirts of society— the promise of an honor and respect that has been purposefully kept from them.

He hears his father’s voice in his head. He sees Gustavo’s peering black eyes glinting in candlelight. He hears him drunkenly slur secrets of tactic and politics—the voracious appetite of the notorious captain could never be held in by his mere lips, and slipped always through the breath of sotol tequila.

When tío Carlos had spoken of la gente, his father instead had spoke of steps.

First this, then this.

_Then we will get there, Carlos, you will see._

As if each person was a pair of legs.

Raphael thinks how his father had walked people in circles, getting them nowhere.

For the first time, Raphael now understands he is being walked in a circle, too. At Zacatecas, and in America. Raphael thinks he has never been free. He feels bitterness in his heart, an ungodly bitterness that stains him in his core like arsenic poisons the seeds of an apple. There is shame there, for the garden of his youth, and the green of his ignorance.

Raphael squints at the flag, in stark crimson, white, and navy, that flaps above the courthouse below Chinatown.

Nicolo swats at his shoulder.

“Ain’t she a beaut?” he asks, eyes gleaming from the sunlight.

“Mm?”

“The flag, knucklehead,” he clips playfully, taking a bite of cured meat on simple bread.

“I’m sure many men have died thinking so,” Raphael answers, watching it.

“You don’t mince words do you, Raph,” Nicolo says, eyes steady on him.

Nicolo is young in appearance, and gentle in demeanor. Raphael likes him because he only says what he means.  His hands are scraped from work in the underground, he can see the raw skin of his palms as he unwraps more of his lunch. A type of meat from Italy that reminds Raphael of chorizo when he had tasted it.

Nicolo’s friendly smile is contagious. Nicolo elbows his companion.

“Don’t think about the past,” he says genuinely. “That’s why it gets left behind, you know. It was made like that for a reason, I think. Think about the future,” he nods, decisively. “That’s the only way to get anywhere. Right? Straight forward. The future will be something else,” he says, determined to convince himself.

“When I am king of New York?” Raphael asks indulgently, after listening to his musings.

“I’ll shine your shoes myself,” Nicolo swears, laughing.

“No, no,” Raphael chides. “That is not how it will be. The day that I am king of New York— on that day, compa, we will all be kings.”

Nicolo grins, eyes brightening.

He drags Raphael up by the shoulder of his jacket as the whistle blows, dusting it off in irony as if anything could possibly help their filthy appearance.

They return to their work in the smudged underground tunnels of New York.

Men walk above them on the pavements—their shining shoes clack.

They talk about the great city, and the system of underground cars that will run them to the future at speeds unknown.

They speak as if New York belongs to them.

But beneath, pick and chisels prove otherwise.

\--

New York screams like one of his mother’s paintings— in a different set of colors.

Women with broken teeth tug at his shoulders as he walks by, begging for coins— but he has none.

One day, he sees a woman with fire-hydrant red lips and startlingly blue eyes. Her hair is blonde like the sun strangled all color out of it, almost too fair to be visible, and the strangeness of her appearance stops him dead in his tracks.

A kind man with black eyes and dark skin, deep like a shadow is on the side of a mountain, tells him directions the first day he becomes lost. When the man smiles his teeth are white as bone, and the contrast against his skin makes Raphael marvel dumbly.

Raphael walks home both on the sidewalk and off of it, moving around cars and skimming the edge of the street. Like learning the pathways in the mountains near Zacatecas, his feet begin to know the alleyways and potholes without thinking.

He makes a curve around a group of worshippers— Hasidic Jewish, with their starched black hats and full beards— as they speak mirthfully to one another in a large group on a street corner.

That is the balancing act of New York, he learns, to be both invisible and bright. 

A woman with red hair, pulled tightly under some kind of bonnet, apologizes profusely to him in hurried, muddled syllables when she accidentally clips his shoulder. She scurries away hauling a basket of laundry twice the width of her frame.

Even as she turns, she refuses to look him in the eyes.

As he approaches the housing his uncle Javier has arranged for them, he glances up above his head at a shadow crossing the edge of his vision.

Lines of laundry dangle across the streetway like banners in a parade.

The source of the shadow, a cat with visible ribs, peers down at him judgmentally. Its yellow eyes are in slits. The alley is quiet, shadowed and cornered away from the bluster and color of the street markets in the immigrant hub of lower Manhattan.

The dilapidated appearance of the apartment and the smell of concrete greets him, like a tired wave.

Raphael passes under the criss-crossed shadows of the laundry lines. They appear like patchwork on his tanned skin, as if someone had sewed up the red scar on his cheek. He kisses his mother at her temple when he enters the house, setting down the brown paper bag in his hands. The bag is curled around his week’s pay.

Her eyes have closed and not yet opened from the gentle touch of his affection.

When she does open them, Guadalupe’s dark eyes are focused through the glass of the window, as if drawing its anemic light to her irises.

“Mijo?” her voice is unused.

It is the first word she has spoken in weeks.

She reaches for Raphael’s hand, head turning in his direction.

He looks over, both startled and awestruck by the sound.

“Mama,” he answers, feeling his heart crinkle under his bones like paper. As if the sound bent up something inside of him. Like a hammer misstriking a nail.

Guadalupe blinks as if coming up from water, eyes clearing as she focuses on him— his red eyes as if he has not slept, his hair loose and unslicked into its beloved style, his clothes torn from sleeping in them.

They look at one another like a hole has opened up beneath them, like they are seeing one another sucked of all their substance.

As if they are recognizing one another from a long time ago.

Seeing him, she suddenly seems to regain her composure, eyes lighting up in a fierce burst. Guadalupe opens two arms for him. She pulls him close into her, forcing him forward, breathing in the scent of him.

“Todos estará bien, promiso,” she says soothingly, strongly rubbing an arc along his back.

Raphael makes an agreeing sound, but it gets caught in his throat.

It seems peeled, like bark pulled away to expose the raw flesh beneath.

“Promiso,” she pledges again, throat tightening. She puts her head to his shoulder.

She cries.

Silent tears bend around her mouth like dew across the soft curves of leaves.

Guadalupe inhales harshly, as if realizing she was charged with paying a great debt all at once, but retained the one thing that truly matters. She tricked the devil with her once-bright smile.

Raphael squeezes his eyes shut, holding her tightly.

 “Tenemos Dios,” Guadalupe reminds, voice like a rock, like a hook in his ear pulling him back to his body.

_They still have God._

Raphael’s eyes are wet when he pulls away from her.

“Dios delivers us here como Cristo en Belén,” she repeats. “No lo olvides,” she warns devoutly.

“Nunca jamás,” he swears back.

She looks at her son.

Raphael — who seems to have grown taller and wiser, in only a month. Guadalupe is a proud woman and does not swipe the tears from her cheeks. She tips her chin up, watching the resolve grow in her son’s eyes as she does so.

“Somos Santiagos,” she says fervently.

Raphael’s gaze is locked into her own, his own dark eyes wide as he holds onto the arm she has at his shoulder.  

They are steadying one another, keeping one another upright.

For once, he is proud of the name.

\--

Simon expects Raphael to be withdrawn into his work.

He enters the cloistered office like he is walking through the glittering shell of a mollusk, admiring the hushed quality of the room and the dark colors.

When he approaches the desk, he is surprised to see Lily already there, her willowy form tall beside Raphael, who is bent over a map that is spread across the space.

And there is another person.

As he enters, Simon can see only the back of her head. She has bright blonde hair that is cropped below the chin. It is not until he rounds the desk that Simon catches a glimpse of her face.

It is wet with blood, streaming from her eyes which are a blanched blue.

He glances to Lily questioningly, and gets an exasperated shoulder shrug in return as she senses his approach.

“With no witnesses, how are we supposed to corroborate your story?” Raphael says to her.

He looks thoughtful.

“It’s a fucking trap,” opines Lily harshly, black eyes sliding to their guest exactingly.

The blonde quivers, bottom lip shaking.

She looks grotesque to Simon— pale skin smeared orange under the blood red tears, one fang protruding out of her gums. She is missing one. Her thin body shivers nervously, and the black pupils of her eyes are blown wide. Her heightened senses ooze from her, uncontrolled, as can sometimes occur when a vampire is fraught with distress.

“—not a trap— please,” she chokes, crimson tears brimming in her eyes again. “ _Please_. I don’t know who else to— who else to turn to. The vampires in Tarrytown would not help me— one of them—Emelia? told me come to Raphael,” she says desperately. The blood falls down her cheeks in beautiful scarlet ribbons. “They said find Raphael in New York and he will help you— she told me you would not turn me away,” the guest pleads, searching for Raphael's hand on the desk. “Please, you are my only hope. _Please.”_

Lily scoffs loudly, rolling her eyes into the ceiling.

She turns away as the girl curls her fingers over Raphael’s hand, begging.

“Where are you from?” Simon asks quietly.

The girl, or she looks as young as one would be, looks towards Simon. She is slightly alarmed by another voice, squinting from the light of the lamp behind him.

“Elizabethtown,” she answers, voice caught in her throat. She has a trace of an accent that surprises Simon. “Near Black Lake.”

“Katrina has come down from the Adirondacks— her clan was attacked by poachers.”

“Poachers?” Simon repeats, surprised.

Raphael nods calmly.

“Claro,” he gestures with one hand, explaining. “Vampiric blood for illegal cocktails, fangs and claws for dark warlock spells— regenerating tissue for your weekly Botox inyección,” he smiles sarcastically. “You name it, cariño. Somebody, somewhere, is doing it.”

Simon fumbles a little at the nickname, given so freely and uninhibited in front of an outsider.

“Or some certain body, some certain where else,” Lily comments derisively.

Simon looks back and forth between them for a moment, before it clicks. “You think this poaching is Clave-sanctioned?”

“Who can say con estos angelitos,” Raphael answers pleasantly, but Raphael’s sarcasm easily reveals his opinion. Raphael’s distrust and criticism of the Clave is some of the most vocal in New York. If the vampiric community plainly knows his feelings, then the Clave itself must have at least heard whispers.

Sometimes, in his worrying, Simon wishes Raphael would not say such things at all.

“They want your head on a wall in Idris,” Lily says urgently, trying to convince her leader against what she must suspect his decision will be.

“I thought-- maybe it’s the werewolves,” Katrina warbles naively, and Lily barks a sharp tack of laughter.

“You’ve mentioned no ill will between you and the neighboring pack,” Raphael recites her comments from earlier, as he looks thoughtfully at the map.

 “But why— why would the Clave do something like that—?” Katrina asks, floundering in her emotions. “They are supposed to protect us,” she says, getting more alarmed by the moment.

“He protects us,” Lily jabs a thumb, gleaming with dark navy polish, in Raphael’s direction. “Not those sugarblooded lightweights on their thrones in Idris.”

Raphael snaps directly with his fingers, focusing on his thoughts, cutting off the stream of unprofessional insults he is sure Lily has in wait.

Katrina however, seems devastated by this revelation about the Clave, and begins to turn into her own palms to cry— but Simon steps in, reaching to stall her hands. He gathers them up quickly and warmly, leaning against the front of Raphael’s desk.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says, promisingly.

She looks up to him, still shivering as if struck out in the cold. But her eyes brighten almost instantly, like flowers starved of light that feel a sliver of sun.

“Whatever happened, we are going to find out what is was— somehow. And if we can bring your clan back to you, we will,” he says it quietly and evenly. As if he is a fire trying to absorb some of her chill. “I swear.”

She nods, hopefully.

Her fingers tighten around Simon's with trust.

Raphael watches the exchange, eyes traveling back to the map and the plotted points of various vampire populations in the villages upstate. His eyes sweep the green detailing over a certain area of the map— disputed lands between werewolves and vampires in the north, although vast distance and Clave judgement in the city makes violent encounters rare.

“Come on. Do you want to get cleaned up?” Simon leans off the desk, still holding her hands as if to pull her up.

“But you will help?” she asks, voice worried, looking around him to the thoughtful Raphael.

Raphael looks over to her.

“I believe you. We will help you,” he says clearly and pointedly.

Simon grows a bit, proud of his answer, and ushers Katrina out of the room. He begins almost instantly to talk softly about nothing, in his comforting way. He winks loyally at Raphael before the door shuts, assuring him he will handle their new guest for the rest of the evening.

“It is _way_ out of our jurisdiction,” Lily objects the moment the door closes.

“Qué? You don’t like the snow, compa?” Raphael asks. “Lucky you bought those Chanel boots.”

“It’s a trap for you, Raphael,” Lily levels, seriously, white palm splayed tightly over the map. “They wanted Camille in power— they want you out. How much more obvious can that be? She was easy to manipulate and you want to be a thorn in their side.”

Raphael eyes the dot that symbolizes Elizabethtown.

“Si, porque. But it wasn’t a trap for her,” he says, referring to the wrecked Katrina, who left the office a mess in Simon’s careful arms. “Ella es inocente. How many more of our people will they maim and disrespect? This is why we staged the ousting of Camille in the first place. We counted on this,” he emphasizes.

“She could be lying,” Lily debates, dark eyes dead on Raphael. “She could be working with them. They could be luring you there with this. We should think of another way to survey this. Contact our people in Tarrytown _first_ ,” she tries to appeal.

“Even if she was lying,” Raphael counters, “Do you think the entirety of her clan was also part of this deal? Do you think they walked into an ambush willingly? No, all this does is prove that the Clave thinks it can use blood against us.”

Raphael nearly grins in anger.

Lily’s mouth is set in a grim line.

“Blood is our territory, pana. They have another thing coming to them now,” he avows.

\--

Later that evening Raphael sits in the chair cast to the side of his room. He watches the flames on the altar reach into the air.

Simon walks in, having just eaten.

“I set her up in one of the rooms in the West Wing— Bernice is guarding the door with Stan. All incognito, you know.”

“Mm,” Raphael answers.

Simon watches him for a moment while he moves across the room. The burning arms of candlelight pull shadows down Raphael’s bones.

Simon rolls up his sleeves to his elbows, crossing his arms as he leans against the bar.

“Why did you agree to help her?”

“It’s my job to protect you,” Raphael says, head resting against the high back of the old-fashioned chair. He looks cloistered like some kind of detective. “All of you.”

“What if it’s like Lily said?”

Raphael looks over to him then, eyes leaving the altar and narrowing as they fall on Simon’s thin form. “A trap?”

“Lily said — they want ‘your head on a wall’. That’s more than a little alarming. Don’t you think?”

Raphael grins a little bit. “Aw, you’re worried about me, baby.”

“I just really don’t think you’d look good as a wall fixture,” Simon shakes his head, oddly serious.

Raphael is still smiling slightly.

“What a shame to waste all the rest of this, no?”

Simon emphasizes, “I’m trying to be serious, Rapha.”

“If you want a trap to fail, you play like you are falling for it,” Raphael assures him.

Simon blinks. In the chair, in the mixture of shadow lines and orange light, Raphael looks different. His form is receded, and his face looks older, the stark black shapes like a beard over his jaw. His clothes seem sewn in different corners, starched and militant. When he moves his arm to replace his glass on the table, it glints like a bayonet as it passes his hip.

When he enters the full swath of light, the illusion disappears.

Simon feels a gentle press of air, cold, and glimpses the candles flickering.

“You were good with her. With Katrina,” Raphael acknowledges, like he was surprised. “Nurturing. Were you always like that?”

“In my human life I was a card-carrying member of the Doomsday Club,” Simon reveals. “It sucks to feel that way— alone. Like you’re in it alone.”

Raphael observes him silently for a moment. “Most people take centuries to learn true compassion.”

“What does that say about you?”

“I still have twenty years left to get it right,” Raphael smiles a bit.

Simon actually laughs lightly, eyes bright in the candlelight.

Raphael likes that look.

Simon looks back over to the altar.

“Do you think they will come?” Simon asks.

“They are already here, querido,” Raphael answers knowingly.

Simon nods, turning from the room to ready for sleep.

Looking back from the door Simon blinks—

There is a tall woman with black hair and a wide-brimmed hat— she leans against the back of the chair where Raphael sits snugly, turned towards the light. Her hat glows on her head like a halo, rimmed by candles. A man, in bright colors with medals hanging from his jacket stands on his other side.

In the corner of the room, where the map of Elizabethtown is unrolled, stands another man, distanced from the other two. He ponders over the image without looking up. His face obscured and dark. He seems voiceless, clothes lit up like by threads of bright glowing green and indelible red.

A younger man lays at Raphael’s feet, arms throw behind his head, face flowered and skeletal.

Raphael’s eyes are closed, asleep.

Simon nearly opens his mouth to wake him—

But the woman in the hat meets his eyes kindly, as if to say, _let him sleep._

Simon watches the apparition until it seems to disappear.

He smiles as the candles burn out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this update is late! my midterms have been KILLINGGG ME this past month but i'm out of the thick of it. i have two more chapters planned for this fic!! thank you for being patient with the update :) and i plan on writing some other raphael/simon fics in the future i think


End file.
